


to want such simple things

by choomchoom



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora (She-Ra) Needs a Hug, Adora has major anxiety problems but it’s her pov and she would insist that she doesn’t, Alternate Universe - College/University, Covid-19 pandemic, F/F, Found Families, Melog is a regular cat, child abuse in flashbacks, no actual virus-related content, the new it fanfic genre: surprise pandemic roommates AU!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25832278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: When Bow and Glimmer both go home to their families after campus closes, Adora expects the next few months to be lonely and boring. Glimmer subletting her room to Catra, who Adora hasn’t spoken to in seven years, makes it anything but.
Relationships: Adora & Bow & Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 93
Kudos: 486





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so. This fic just kind of happened to me. It’s a she-ra college au and it’s a period piece about April 2020 and a little bit of a structural homage Nina LaCour’s beautiful YA novel We Are Okay and I wrote nearly the entire first draft inside a week. It’s about family and loneliness and abuse and the concept of deserving love. 
> 
> Content notes/warnings: chapters 2 and 4 take place 7-10 years before the main story and include depictions of child abuse - mostly psychological, some physical. You don’t need to read the flashback chapters to understand the main plot - they’re there because I wanted to explore the origin of the mindset Adora has at the start of the main timeline of the fic. Outside of the flashbacks, there are a couple more small cws that I’ll put in the relevant chapters for particular scenes, with explanations in the end notes.

It takes Adora something like five seconds to regret not going with Glimmer.

It’s not even that she doesn’t like Bright Moon. She’s stayed at Glimmer’s house in the suburbs during the holidays since she met Glimmer freshman year, and Angella has been nothing but welcoming. 

But this is different. If Adora goes to Bright Moon, there’s no guarantee she’ll have any reason to come back to school, when it’s looking increasingly impossible for their college to go back to in-person classes in the fall. She’d be inserting herself into their family with no endpoint in sight, and she’s always been careful to avoid being too much of a burden on them. 

They wouldn’t kick her out. But eventually, she’s sure, they’d get tired of her. 

Still, though, as soon as Glimmer shuts the door behind her Adora’s mind is swamped with longing for the well-lit rooms, gigantic kitchen, and huge backyard at Glimmer’s house in Bright Moon, and she already misses Glimmer. Bow’s been staying with his dads since school shut down during spring break, but Glimmer had been in a fight with Angella and for obvious reasons Adora had opted to stay in the city with her, and...now she’s alone. 

It’s okay. It’s fine. She’s used to it. 

She only has a few minutes to feel sorry for herself before the doorbell rings. Glimmer had apparently told the girl who’s subletting her room that she’d be out by one, and it’s a little after two now. Not thinking much of it, Adora stands up and opens the door. 

Catra is standing on the other side. 

All thoughts of Glimmer and Bow and Bright Moon and the fall semester are suddenly very, very far away as she looks at Catra. It’s unmistakably her, even after seven years. She’s staring at Adora, too - or maybe glaring is a better word. 

Adora still remembers Catra’s hand squeezing hers the last time they saw each other, the wobble in Catra’s voice as she’d begged her to stay. She’s spent every moment since then expecting to carry that moment and the associated helpless regret with her forever. She had never expected to see Catra again. 

“You cut your hair,” Adora says, after they’ve been standing on opposite sides of the doorway for far longer than would have been reasonable. 

“Yeah,” Catra says. She sounds...older, Adora thinks. More sure of herself, even though Adora can tell from her narrowed eyes and the tense set of her shoulders that she’s just as off-balance here as Adora is. “People do that. Except you, apparently. Can I come in?” 

“I - yeah, of course.” Adora steps out of the doorway, blinking a few times as she processes the fact that Catra is going to be _living_ here. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt over leggings and carrying a stuffed backpack over one shoulder and a duffel bag that’s being held together by duct tape in her other hand. Her nails are painted black, just like she’d always insisted on keeping them when they were thirteen, and seeing that puts Adora on the verge of laughing or crying or both. Catra is _here_ , in Adora’s apartment, where she’s going to be staying. This is the most bizarre thing that’s happened to her all year, and that’s saying something. 

Adora closes the door behind her. There’s something that feels final about it, as she takes her hand off the doorknob and looks at Catra. The two of them are in here, alone, and that’s how it’s going to be for the next month and probably longer. All of Adora’s expectations for the month have been yanked away and replaced with the unknown and unknowable. 

Catra hates her. Doesn’t she? Seven years is a long time to hate a person, but if anyone’s capable of it, it’s Catra. But she’d come inside, and she’d made a weak comment about Adora’s hair instead of leading with _how dare you_ so maybe...maybe. 

“Which one is mine?” Catra asks, glancing down the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. It’s not hard to find - there’s the living room, which they’re standing in, the cramped little kitchen next to it, and on the other side, the hallway that leads to the bathroom and three bedrooms. 

“Glim - uh, your room is the first one on the left,” Adora says. Then, because she feels like she needs to say _something_ to acknowledge the elephant in the room, she adds, “Glimmer never mentioned your name.” 

“She didn’t mention yours either.” Catra avoids eye contact as she heads toward the bedroom. Adora can’t think of anything else to say before the door shuts. 

As soon as Catra’s out of sight, she’s aware of her heart pounding in her chest, her whole body wired for a fight. She goes to the kitchen and opens the window, head swimming. 

_Catra_ is going to be her roommate. During a stay-at-home order. She tries to focus on the feel of the breeze coming in through the window on her skin and counts her breaths to ground herself, which calms her down physically, but doesn’t get her any more used to the idea. 

Adora gives her an hour. She stares at her schoolwork for a little bit before giving up for the day, stares at the inside of the refrigerator with vague intentions of making a shopping list, stares at herself in the mirror to...maybe to try to see what Catra is seeing. 

At the end of the hour, Adora knocks on Glimmer’s - Catra’s - door. “I’m going grocery shopping this afternoon.” She’d been avoiding it this week so that she wouldn’t feel too bad about hugging Glimmer goodbye. “You’re welcome to come with me if you want, or I can pick up a few things for you.” 

It’s silent for what feels like a beat too long, then Catra opens the door. “I’ll come.” She’s put sheets on Glimmer’s bed, but there’s nothing in the way of decorations - probably not much room for it, in a backpack and a duffel bag. Adora wonders if Catra ever got in the habit of decorating her spaces, like Adora hadn’t until Glimmer had insisted when they got their first real apartment sophomore year, then she shakes the thought out of her head. It’s not like the set of world maps on her bedroom wall, which Bow had gotten her last Christmas and are Adora’s only decoration to speak of, makes her an expert. 

Adora leads Catra to Bow’s car, which is sitting in its usual spot in the parking lot. Catra lifts her eyebrows when she sees it. “Nice ride.” 

“It isn’t mine,” Adora says, unlocking the doors and gesturing at the passenger seat. 

Adora glimpses Catra’s face over the car’s sunroof as she’s about to pull open the door. Catra is full-on grinning, like Adora’s only ever seen her do after a particularly well-executed prank. 

“Wha - I didn’t _steal_ it,” Adora says, an automatic response to that expression. “It’s my roommate’s.” 

Catra rolls her eyes but follows Adora’s lead and gets in the car. “The sparkly one?” 

“No, the other one. Bow. He’s been staying with his parents since everything started, but he wanted to keep paying his own rent just in case his dads drive him nuts and he wants to come back.” 

“Must be nice to have a choice about it,” Catra says. 

Adora’s instinct is to refute it - to balance Catra’s bitterness with her own optimism, to do everything she can to make Catra more palatable to the adults around them by positioning the two of them as a unit. But they’re adults, now, and they’re alone in this car. “Yeah,” Adora says, quiet enough that she can pretend it was drowned out in the sound of her starting the engine. 

“So,” Catra says as Adora pulls the car out onto the road, “How’d you meet Sparkles?” 

“ _Glimmer_ and I were roommates our freshman year of college,” she says. It’s a lot easier to talk about Glimmer than about any of the things Adora’s been thinking about. “She and Bow have been friends since they were kids, and we’ve all been living together since last year.” 

Adora can’t find it in herself to be offended when Catra rolls her eyes. “Of course you’re in college.” 

“You could be too. I know you’re smart enough.” 

“It’s a matter of being smart enough? Really?” 

“That and being willing to work for it.” 

“That’s cute.” 

“I mean it. The University gives out a lot of scholarships to local kids, and there’s some money available specifically for kids who were in the system. I’m going to graduate with barely any debt.” 

“That’s so wonderful for you.” Catra’s voice is razor sharp, and even now Adora remembers that tone well enough to know not to push her any further.

“And what are you doing with your life?” Adora asks. 

“Surviving.” 

It’s Adora’s turn to roll her eyes. She can’t even remember the last time she did that. “Yeah, no shit. What specifically?” 

“I thought Sparkles would have told you. The restaurant I was working at went under, but I have a new gig lined up starting next week. I’m going to be a receptionist at the animal hospital up near the university.” 

“And you...wanted to move closer?” Adora will let Catra say yes, if she wants to, but she knows that’s not the reason. Nobody would move in with a stranger right now only for convenience.

“Nah. My old roommate was a coworker, and neither of us had enough saved to come up with rent. Our landlord let us bail, and my roommate lent me some money to come up with the deposit on your place,” she says. Then she straightens and looks at Adora. “Which you are never, ever, _ever_ telling Glimmer.” 

“Of course not,” Adora says, her mind already racing to process what just happened. Catra had told Adora something that she hadn’t wanted Glimmer to know, something secret, and not even seemed to realize it until after. Like she trusts Adora. 

But Adora doesn’t deserve that trust, and both of them know it. Maybe the immediate demand not to tell Glimmer says more about what Catra _actually_ thinks of Adora. 

It’s a relief to finally pull into the grocery store parking lot. Adora parks and pulls on a mask and Catra does the same beside her, and they both get out of the car. 

* * *

Even trips to the grocery store are weird these days. Random things are still out of stock and it seems like they have been for weeks, everyone’s avoiding stepping into each other’s space, and a general air of tension is everywhere. 

Adora hadn’t actually managed to make a list. She falls back on buying the kinds of things she’d bought back when she was first on her own at sixteen - cereal and milk, bread and peanut butter, eggs and ramen packs, frozen vegetables and chicken nuggets. It already looks depressing as she steers her cart toward checkout. She’s used to eating lunches on campus and cooking with Bow and Glimmer a few times a week, but she always did more chopping vegetables than actual cooking and she doesn’t feel confident in her ability to replicate any of Bow’s recipes. She and Glimmer have fended for themselves the last few weeks, but Glimmer knows how to cook three things and all of them are enough work that Adora can’t imagine bothering to make them for just herself. 

She checks out and glances around for Catra. She finds her approaching the registers, and can’t help but watch as Catra efficiently unloads her basket and gives curt responses to the cashier’s small talk. It feels like it should be getting easier to accept the reality of Catra existing in her presence, but every second she’s there, every movement she makes, feels almost as spectacular as the moment Adora first recognized her standing outside her door. 

She makes eye contact with Adora as she takes her receipt, and Adora jerks her head away way too late to pretend she hadn’t been watching her. She peeks back as Catra walks over. Catra’s expression is mostly unreadable beneath her mask, but Adora can at least tell that she isn’t angry. 

They put the groceries in the car and set off in silence. Adora’s mind scrambles for conversation topics, but she rejects all of them because of the ways they could somehow lead to memories of the day Adora left, and Adora wants to leave that topic alone for as long as Catra is willing to. It’s not a long drive back to the apartment, where Adora finally thinks of something to say as she’s unlocking the door. “Glimmer left you a key and a sheet with contact information for all of us, plus the landlord and utility companies.” The latter, Adora realizes, had probably been in case Adora had decided to join Glimmer in Bright Moon after all. “I’m taking care of rent and bills and you’ll pay me when it’s time, so that’s all just in case something happens. It’s on the kitchen table.” Finally, she gets the door unlocked around her bags of groceries. She dumps the bags on the floor and grabs the key and sheet of notebook paper and hands them to Catra. 

“Thanks,” Catra says. 

“I think the WiFi password is on there too. Let me know if it isn’t.” 

Then there’s nothing else to say on that, so Adora is left staring at Catra, who’s staring at her. Adora wonders if she also feels like she’s staring down the bottomless pit of the next few weeks, if she also lost her footing and fell into an uncertain abyss when she saw Adora’s face again. 

Catra looks away first. “Do you have a system for the fridge?” 

Adora turns to start unpacking her own groceries. “Usually we all share food. But we can split it up if you’d rather.” 

Catra opens the fridge. “I’ll put my stuff on the top left.” 

That’s the last they speak before Catra takes the key and notebook paper into her room. Adora finishes unloading her groceries and goes back to her own room, where she sits at her desk and stares blankly at the closed lid of her laptop until her phone vibrates. 

“Hey, Glimmer.”

“Hey. I just got in - did Catra make it okay?” 

“Glimmer.” Adora mashes her palm against her forehead and says it before Glimmer thinks it’s worse than it is. “I know her.” 

“Oh, really? That’s good...right?”

“We haven’t seen each other since we were thirteen.” 

“How do you know her? Did you go to school together?” 

Adora doesn’t want Catra hearing this. She stands up, grabs her keys, and goes back out to sit in the car. “We lived together,” she says as soon as the apartment door closes behind her. They’re on the first floor, so they have their own entrance out into the parking lot. 

“Oh.” 

Glimmer’s quiet word pokes at something uncomfortable in Adora. Glimmer knows the basics of her story - that she had never known who her father was, her mother had died when she was too young to remember, and she had lived with her grandparents until her grandmother had died when she was nine and her grandfather had gotten sick and needed to be put in a care facility when she was ten. She’d spent six years in foster care and then proved she was mature enough to switch to an independent living program when she’d turned sixteen. Glimmer knew that she’d been with her first foster family the longest, and that her getting out had been for a reason other than random chance, but she hadn’t asked any more questions, and Adora doesn’t think she would have answered them if she had. 

Adora’s sure from Glimmer’s tone that Glimmer has guessed what happened in that house - probably she’s actually thinking that it was worse than it was. But Adora can’t tell her the whole story, especially now. With Catra back in her life, it’s not only her story to tell. 

“How are you feeling?” Glimmer asks, when Adora doesn’t offer any more information. 

Adora doesn’t have words for it - she hasn’t felt quite like this before, ever. “I’m okay.”

“Sorry you didn’t have a chance to vet her - it all happened really fast.”

“I wouldn’t have said no,” Adora assures her. It’s true, and even if she’d had some warning, she would just have spent the extra time agonizing over it. It feels important to say it, because Adora doesn’t think that all the explaining in the world would be enough to make Glimmer really understand what she and Catra had been to each other. “It’s okay. It’s just not what I expected.” She wracks her brain for a subject change. “How’s your mom?” 

“Same as ever,” Glimmer says. Adora can’t help but smile at the exasperated fondness in her voice. By the time they’re finished chatting about Angella and their schoolwork, the sun is starting to set and Adora feels a little closer to normal. When Glimmer hangs up, though, the memories and current reality of Catra come rushing back, and she sits in the car, gathering her nerves to go back inside, until the sky is completely dark. 

* * *

She doesn’t see Catra again that night. The next morning, she wakes up to a chime from her phone, like she’s done most mornings since the stay home order was announced. Sometimes she’s up first and sends the wake-up text to Bow, but she kind of prefers receiving them. It means that someone is thinking of her.

Bow has sent her a picture of himself, hair lopsided from sleep, frowning at his hand, which he’s shoved into one of his running shoes. _Not sure this is right,_ is the caption. 

She gets out of bed and finds her own running shoes, which she quickly ties together and then balances on her head like a hat. _Pretty sure it goes like this_. 

They keep swapping texts as Adora gets dressed, and she’s out the door by ten after six. The sun has barely risen, and the streets are empty at this hour, so Adora doesn’t feel bad being out without a mask on. Her phone vibrates a few minutes after she starts, indicating that Bow is running, too, around the streets of the rural town a few hours away where George and Lance live. 

She has a couple routes that she rotates through, these days, with the campus gym closed and her workouts limited to running or push-ups and squats in her bedroom. This morning she opts for one of her favorites, a longer route that takes her through a neighborhood full of pretty houses with wide lawns on rolling hills. It’s as close as she can get, in running distance, to an entirely different world from the rows of apartment buildings that make up the student neighborhood Adora lives in. 

When she gets back to the apartment, Catra is awake and staring at Glimmer’s shelf of coffeemakers, her expression somewhere between worried and impressed. She nods a cool greeting when she sees Adora. “I was wondering where you’d went.” 

Those words hit Adora far deeper than Catra probably means them to. Adora isn’t used to anyone wondering or caring where she is - her friends know that she can take care of herself, and that’s what matters most, anyway. But Adora can’t help the warmth that flares in her at Catra - not missing her, not even _caring_ , necessarily, but at least noticing. 

“You found the coffee wall,” Adora says, nodding to the shelf in front of Catra. 

“I don’t suppose there’s a normal coffeepot hidden somewhere.” Catra’s looking at the shelf again. Adora knows the coffee shelf well enough, and her eyes fall, without any real input from her, on Catra. 

She notices the way her pajama pants cling to her hips, the strip of skin between the waistband and her tank top, that her hair looks really cute tousled and sticking up, and that she isn’t wearing a bra, before forcing herself to look away. 

“Nah. Just the pourover, the fancy pourover, the French press, and the espresso maker,” Adora says. At Catra’s flat look, she shrugs. “Glimmer’s really into coffee.” 

Catra goes back to staring at the shelf, and Adora takes pity, reaching for the French press. “This one’s easiest.” 

“It’s hard to imagine you drinking coffee,” Catra says. 

For the second time this morning, the words strike Adora deeper than anything about the conversation has any right to. “I, uh, don’t. Glimmer’s rubbed off enough that I know how to do it, though.”

Catra’s looking at her while she talks, and Adora feels a sudden urgent need to turn her attention to the coffee maker. “You just put the grounds in the bottom - six tablespoons if you want to make a whole pot, four is usually plenty for one person. We have the electric kettle for boiling water, and when it’s done you just pour it over the grounds and wait five minutes.” 

“Thanks,” Catra says, examining the electric kettle for a moment and then walking over to the sink to start filling it. 

Adora tears her eyes away from Catra’s back the moment she realizes she’s staring. “I’m going to go shower. I’ll see you later.” 

Adora’s already on her way down the hall, so she’s not sure if she’s imagining it when she hears Catra laugh. 

* * *

Adora spends most of the day in online classes and doing homework while Catra’s off putting the rest of the stuff from her old apartment into storage. She gets back around five, and that’s when Adora decides that she can’t spend another minute of today staring at her laptop screen. 

When she goes out into the main area of the apartment, Catra’s in the kitchen, setting up ingredients on what looks like every available surface. Adora feels exactly what Catra must have felt that morning at the brief implication that Adora might drink coffee - the idea of Catra cooking for herself, cooking something that involves butter and flour and potatoes, real ingredients that don’t start with r or end with -amen, is somehow threatening Adora’s entire understanding of the world. 

“Hey, Adora,” she says, as if everything about this situation - the flour and butter and potatoes, the fact that the two of them are in this apartment together in the first place - is totally normal. “Want to make pierogies?” 

“Sure,” Adora says, because for all that the world may have turned upside down, she doesn't actually have anything better to do this evening. 

Catra shows her how to make the dough, asking her occasionally where measuring cups and the like are kept. They microwave potatoes, scoop out the insides, and mix them with cheese. 

It’s not until they’re standing side by side at the counter, Adora rolling out dough to cut into circles while Catra rolls the first batch into little dumplings, that Catra says, “Scorpia and I would make these sometimes. We always had some in the freezer, and whenever we ran out we would spend the next day we both had off pretty much just doing this.” 

“Scorpia being your-” _roommate_ is how Adora wants to end the sentence, but she cuts herself off, not wanting to make assumptions.

“Roommate,” Catra says, more fondly than Adora’s used to hearing the word. It’s comforting to hear it that way. Adora knows that ‘roommate’ means more to her than it does to most other people - people like Bow and Glimmer, who have someplace else to go. Who have families. 

“What’s Scorpia like?” Adora asks, pushing down a completely ridiculous spike of jealousy at the very concept of her. Adora has no right to feel replaced, not when she could have made a different decision and been there the whole time. 

“She’s nice. Really nice. And thoughtful and positive and loyal.” Catra looks at Adora, eyes narrowed, and apparently finds what she’s looking for. “We dated for a bit, after we met last year, but we decided we were better off as friends.”

Adora can’t help it - she tenses. She isn’t surprised that Catra still likes girls, and it’s not as if Adora doesn’t, too, or that she would be upset about it either way. But Catra mentioning _that_ had always been a surefire lead-in to an evening full of screaming and accusations. 

But that was a long time ago and it’s just the two of them in this house. “I’m glad you have someone like that,” Adora says, balling up some leftover dough to re-roll. 

“I did, at least.” Catra’s frowning when Adora looks at her. “We decided together that she would go stay with her family and I would find a new place. It’s not like she left for no reason. But still. She left.”

Adora scrambles for something to say. A part of her that she quickly tamps down on wants to scold Catra for feeling abandoned when Scorpia had just been making the best choice for herself in a situation that’s been terrible on everyone, but she already knows that the person she really wants to scold is herself. 

“For whatever it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here,” she says in the end. 

“Ha,” Catra says humorlessly. 

“I mean it. It’s nice to have someone who gets it.”

Adora knows that she’s taking a risk and wouldn’t be surprised if Catra throws it back in her face - and maybe there would be some truth to it. Maybe it would take the people in Adora’s life fewer days to find her body if she died. But still, she’s familiar with the gut-deep knowledge that she isn't needed and won’t be missed, not like Angella would miss Glimmer or Bow’s dads would miss him. 

Catra pauses in folding the dumplings to look at Adora. She smiles after a moment, though, and doesn’t push on it. “The next step is boiling these. Where can I find your biggest pot?” 

Adora shows her, relieved to have the out from the conversion, to have the chance to pretend that everything’s okay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's be honest i'm probably going to post a chapter a day


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is one of two made up of flashbacks to adora and catra growing up. warnings for controlling and abusive behavior enacted on children by an adult, unequal treatment/pitting children against each other, and fear/anxiety surrounding those things. if you'd rather give this chapter a pass, please do - i'll summarize the important points in the end notes of the next chapter.

Shadow Weaver’s house was bigger than Adora had expected, and so was Shadow Weaver. She’d been imagining a woman like her grandma, who had been just barely taller than nine-year-old Adora. Shadow Weaver was nearly as tall as the doorway of the sprawling two-story house, and Adora, who hadn’t been afraid before despite everyone’s assurances that it would be okay if she was, started to feel nervous.

Shadow Weaver looked down at Adora and smiled, and Adora tried to keep her nervousness out of the smile she gave her in return. “Welcome,” Shadow Weaver said. “Come inside.” 

Adora stepped into the house. It was dark inside, and so intensely air conditioned that it didn’t so much provide a relief from the summer heat as sting her skin. Adora wondered why Shadow Weaver didn’t just keep her house a normal temperature and take off the jacket she was wearing, but she knew that it wasn’t polite to ask questions like that to strangers. 

Shadow Weaver gestured for Adora and Claire, a woman she’d been seeing a lot of since the people in charge had decided that Adora’s grandfather had gotten too sick to take care of her, to follow her to the kitchen table. The chairs were a little too tall for Adora to sit in comfortably, but she just straightened her back and curled her toes against the floor. 

“It’s so lovely to have you here, Adora,” Shadow Weaver said, looking at Adora very intently. Adora flattened her palms against her chair to keep herself from squirming. 

“It’s lovely to meet you,” she mimicked. 

Shadow Weaver turned to Claire. “So polite!” Adora’s shoulders relaxed a little. 

Shadow Weaver and Claire did most of the talking after that, while Adora snuck glances out the window at the house’s big backyard. It was a beautiful yard, surrounded by trees and divided into three separate patches of gardens, with enough grass in between to kick a soccer ball around if Adora was careful. Had she remembered to pack her soccer ball? 

Soon enough Claire hugged Adora goodbye and shut the door behind her, leaving Adora and Shadow Weaver in the strange midday darkness. “Let me show you your room,” Shadow Weaver said. She started up the stairs and Adora grabbed her suitcase and hefted it up after her. 

The second floor was even darker, and somehow the window in Adora’s room didn’t even help much. The view was out the side of the house, and she could see mostly the next house over, and a bit of the street and the gardens. The walls were gray and the blanket folded at the end of the bed was dark blue. There was a desk in one corner and a closet door in another, and the floor was wood that felt cold even through Adora’s sandals. 

“Claire mentioned that you like to draw,” Shadow Weaver said, crossing the room to pick up the one non-furniture item Adora could see. It was a sketchbook, with thick white paper and a pack of smooth-sided pencils attached to the front. She handed it to Adora. “I expect to see this filled up.” 

“Thank you! Yes. Of course.” It was a big sketchbook, but school didn’t start again for another whole month. Adora had plenty of time. 

Shadow Weaver smiled, and Adora felt more of her nervousness trickle away. “I think we’re going to do great things together,” she said. 

Adora didn’t know how she was supposed to respond to that, so she only nodded.

* * *

Adora spent the next month learning quite deeply two joint lessons: that Shadow Weaver liked her, and that she was very, very lucky that was the case. 

Shadow Weaver didn’t like Octavia quite as much, and she yelled at her a lot. Octavia was sixteen, and Adora first met her a week after moving in, when Octavia got back from working at a summer camp. The night Octavia got home was the first time Adora ever heard Shadow Weaver yell. Octavia yelled back, and it went on like that for a long time. Adora sat at her desk the whole time, pretending to draw in her sketchbook, which her hands were shaking too hard to actually do. 

The problem was that Octavia had forgotten to take her shoes off when she’d come in and tracked mud up the stairs. Adora hadn’t realized that she was supposed to take her shoes off when she came in - Shadow Weaver hadn’t told her, and she hadn’t yelled or even commented when Adora wore her shoes up to her room after sketching flowers outside or carefully kicking her soccer ball around between the gardens. She would be careful not to do that in the future. 

The next day, the problem was that Octavia had gone over to the neighbor’s house without permission. Adora had been in the front yard, sketching, and she’d seen what had happened. Octavia had been in the garage, putting away some stuff she’d had at summer camp, and the next-door neighbor had come over, rapping on the side of the garage and asking if Octavia would mind helping him move some stuff from the car into the house because his knee was hurting. Octavia had said that sure, she would help, and she’d been back in the garage something like five minutes later. Adora hadn’t even thought that Shadow Weaver had known about it, but she had raised her voice as soon as Octavia went back in the house. 

Adora could hear the entire argument from outside, and after a few minutes she realized that going over to the neighbor’s house to help him unload the car wasn’t against the rules and never had been: the problem was Octavia. It didn’t matter what the rules were - Octavia wasn’t making much of an effort to follow them, and Shadow Weaver wanted her to try harder. Based on the things she yelled at Octavia over, Shadow Weaver was clearly giving Adora too much credit, but she could deal with that by doing her best to do whatever Shadow Weaver wanted from her. 

Adora really, really didn’t want Shadow Weaver yelling at her. It always started out as being about something specific Octavia had done or hadn’t done, but after a few minutes it always turned into Shadow Weaver calling Octavia lazy and ungrateful and selfish and meaner words. Adora knew that she wasn’t perfect either, and she was terrified that Shadow Weaver would one day catch her at emptying the dishwasher wrong, or opening her window at night to get some relief from the cold, or not caring enough, and say all those things to her. 

She never did, though, and after a few weeks Adora got up the courage to ask about it. She and Shadow Weaver were in the car on the way to the grocery store, and Octavia was at a friend’s house for the afternoon. “Why do you never yell at me like you yell at Octavia?” 

Shadow Weaver looked at Adora for a bit longer than Adora was comfortable with before turning back to the road in front of her. “What are you talking about?” 

Part of Adora wanted to just let the conversation end, but she curled her palms against the seat and forged ahead. “Yesterday you were really mad at her for leaving the back door open when she went out to water the plants, but I did the same thing last week and you just closed the door behind me and didn’t say anything.” 

“When you saw the closed door, did you understand what you’d done wrong?” Shadow Weaver asked. 

“Of course.”

“And did you promise yourself that you would be more careful with it next time?” 

Adora hadn’t exactly - she hadn’t even thought about it until she’d overheard Shadow Weaver yelling at Octavia last night. But she knows the correct answer. “Yes.” 

“That’s why, Adora. You understand that the way I like to do things is important, and that what I say is what is done when you live in my house. Octavia doesn’t. She needs to be taught to respect authority.”

“Oh.” That made a lot more sense than anything Adora had imagined. 

“I’m so glad we’re in each other’s lives, Adora,” Shadow Weaver said, reaching over to place a hand on Adora’s shoulder as she pulled into a parking spot. “I’ve missed having someone around who understands me.” 

Adora nodded, more frightened than before. She didn’t understand Shadow Weaver, not at all, and now she could never, ever tell that to her. When Shadow Weaver turned off the car and looked at her, she tried to smile. 

* * *

A week after Adora started school again, Catra came to live with them. 

Adora watched from the top of the stairs as Shadow Weaver greeted Catra and an unfamiliar adult in the foyer and gestured them toward the kitchen. Catra was looking around at the dark walls and dark furniture, unimpressed. 

As she crossed the room, she looked up and met Adora’s eyes. Adora’s smile came easier than it had in weeks, and something felt very light inside her when Catra’s whole expression eased as she smiled back. 

Adora didn’t meet Catra until Shadow Weaver brought her upstairs - Shadow Weaver had asked her to stay in her room so that Shadow Weaver could meet her first. When Shadow Weaver’s familiar footsteps had gone back down the stairs, Adora peeked out her door at the room next to hers, which was set up pretty much like Adora’s. Catra was standing in the center, duffle bag still closed beside her, looking around at the room. 

“Hi,” Adora said from the hallway. 

Catra turned to her, tension receding from her face again with a smile. “Hi. Adora, right?” 

“Yeah.” 

“What do you think of this place?” Catra asked. 

Adora froze. She hadn’t expected to be asked that, or bothered, at any point, to come up with an answer. “It’s good,” she said, because there was a chance Shadow Weaver could hear them. “Shadow Weaver is a little, uh, strict. But -” She couldn’t think of a _but_. “It’s good,” she finished. 

Catra’s eyes narrowed, and her gaze moved away from Adora’s eyes to examine the rest of her. 

“She doesn’t hit us,” Adora assured her. That was the kind of thing that had never happened to Adora, but Claire had warned her about it, and told Adora to call her if it did. 

Catra looked at her for a moment longer and then shrugged and stooped down to unzip her bag. “Good.” 

* * *

It took three days before Shadow Weaver first yelled at Catra. 

Adora had spent most of that three days tensed, waiting for it. While Adora spent all the time she was around Shadow Weaver watching her, making sure that she wasn’t doing anything Shadow Weaver didn’t want her to be doing, and the rest of her time being out of the way and quiet, those things didn’t seem to come naturally to Catra. Adora had warned her about how Shadow Weaver didn’t like for anyone to wear shoes inside the first time she’d seen Shadow Weaver staring after Catra with her lips tightened in anger, but Catra had just kept wearing her shoes inside. She was loud, too, which unnerved even Adora in this house that was always nearly silent unless someone was yelling. She laughed loud enough to reach every corner of the house when something funny happened on TV, and when Adora made a joke about one of their teachers at their new school, and when Shadow Weaver charged out of the house waving a broom to shoo away a squirrel from one of her flower beds. 

Adora could tell that Shadow Weaver didn’t like it, and didn’t get why Catra couldn’t seem to see the same thing. 

On the third day, it was raining hard and Catra and Adora ran from the school bus in the street toward the porch. Adora tripped over her own shoelace and slipped, falling down hard on the grass. 

When she got her breath back enough to push herself up off the ground, her hands and all her clothes and even her backpack straps were covered in mud. Her eyes watered. Shadow Weaver was _not_ going to like that. 

“What are you waiting for?” Catra asked, walking back toward Adora from the porch. Her hair was soaked almost straight, and Adora could hear her shoes squelching even through the sound of the rain. 

Adora tried to brush the mud off herself, but only succeeded in smearing it around. 

“What’s wrong? It’s just mud,” Catra said, assessing Adora from above and then bending down in front of her, scraping some mud up with her pointer finger, and poking Adora in the forehead with it. 

Adora was too surprised to be nervous anymore. She looked up and gaped at Catra, then a raindrop fell straight into her throat and she started coughing. 

Catra laughed and offered her a hand up. “Now you get to get me. It’s only fair.” 

Adora should have stopped it. She should have known that it wasn’t a good idea. But she was only thinking of Catra’s laughter as she wiped the mud from one of her hands onto Catra’s shoulder. 

“Race you to the big tree in the back!” Catra said, dashing off without waiting for Adora to nod. 

“Hey, no fair!” Adora did her best to chase her, but Catra was fast and Adora was still wearing her backpack. Still, she was only a few steps behind Catra when Catra reached the tree, which meant that she bowled straight into her trying to stop on the slippery ground. They both went tumbling down, and by the time they sat up, Catra was just as muddy as Adora. 

“Fine, you win,” Catra said, scooping up some more mud to throw at Adora’s shirt. She caught a chunk of it and threw it back. It wasn’t like their clothes could get any dirtier. 

That didn’t stop them from running all over the yard, trying to throw chunks of mud at each other and dodge them in return. They were chasing each other around the big tree and laughing when Shadow Weaver’s voice cut through the rain. 

“ _What_ is going on here?”

Adora stopped so fast Catra bumped into her back, and both of them went down to the ground from the stilled momentum. Adora stood up as fast as she could, suddenly acutely aware of the mud clinging to the sides of her jeans, the front of her shirt, and her hair, and the fact that the books in her backpack were probably getting wet from the rain. 

“We were just playing,” Catra, still on the ground, said. 

Adora stiffened. Catra didn’t get it. If Shadow Weaver didn’t like what you were doing, you apologized and stopped doing it. You didn’t argue. 

Shadow Weaver didn’t give Adora a chance to explain that. She came out of the house, holding an umbrella, her nice shoes squishing deep into the mud. 

“I let you come into my home,” she said as she advanced on them, eyes focused on Catra. “I give you food and shelter and I don’t ask for anything in return, and _this_ is how you repay me.” She picks up the broken stem of a flower that’s lying on the ground. Adora remembers sliding across the ground and feeling something snap as her ankle hit it. 

Shadow Weaver chased squirrels off with sticks when they got into her flowers, and they didn’t even know better. Adora’s fingers tightened on her backpack straps. 

“It was an accident,” Catra said. 

“We’re sorry,” said Adora. 

Shadow Weaver barely looked at her before turning back to Catra. “Are you?” 

“We didn’t do anything wrong!” 

Shadow Weaver’s eyes narrowed. “You ungrateful waste,” she said. “You are going to stay out here and fix this. You're not coming back inside my house until this garden looks just like it did this morning.” She pointed to the broken-stemmed flower, and a few more sets of flowers whose roots were visible underneath muddy footprints.

“Uh, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you can’t just glue broken flowers back together. They’ll grow back,” Catra said. 

“I’ll help you. We’ll figure it out,” Adora said, desperate to get Shadow Weaver away from them. 

Catra had time for a small smile for her before Shadow Weaver spoke again. “No. Adora, you’re coming with me.” 

Now Catra and Shadow Weaver were both looking at Adora. “I really don’t mind helping,” Adora said. 

“That’s very kind of you, but you’re filthy. Come inside and clean up.”

Adora wavered. She wanted to stay with Catra, but knew that it wasn’t a good idea to argue with Shadow Weaver. 

“Come on, Adora. Set a good example,” Shadow Weaver said. “Eventually _that one_ will learn how to behave.” 

Adora regretted it immediately, but she turned and followed Shadow Weaver into the cold, dark house. 

“Take your shoes off and go on upstairs to shower,” Shadow Weaver said. “Leave your backpack here, too."

Adora couldn’t avoid dripping some muddy water onto the floor as she did what she was instructed, but Shadow Weaver didn’t comment.

Adora glanced back out at Catra, who had her back to the house and her hands in the flower bed. “Shadow Weaver, it was my fault just as much as hers,” she said. 

Shadow Weaver put a hand on Adora’s shoulder. Adora did her best not to tense. Shadow Weaver only ever seemed to do that when she was about to say something that Adora wasn’t going to like. “Would you have decided to cover yourself in mud and ruin my flowers if you were out here by yourself?” 

“No,” said Adora. _Catra wouldn’t have either_ lodged in her throat. It didn’t matter that Catra had only been trying to make Adora feel better. All that mattered to Shadow Weaver was that Catra wasn’t sorry. 

“Then you understand why Catra is out there and you’re in here,” Shadow Weaver said. “Go upstairs. Shower.” 

Too scared to argue, Adora followed the instruction. She almost went back down when she heard Shadow Weaver open the door to go back outside, but she didn’t know how she would make things any better. She got in the shower. 

Catra was in her room with the door closed by the time she was done showering and changing, and Shadow Weaver was downstairs in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning, making too much noise to hear their conversation if they whispered. Adora knocked on her door as softly as she could. “Catra?” 

“What?” She didn’t open the door, and Adora’s heart plummeted to her stomach. 

“That was the most fun I’ve had since I got here,” she said, like she’d come here to say. She stepped back, bracing herself to go back to her own room if Catra didn’t want to talk to her. 

Catra opened the door this time, wearing a towel around her school clothes, which looked even wetter than they’d been from the rain, but less muddy. Her hair was a mess of tangles in every direction. 

“She sprayed me with the garden hose so I wouldn’t track mud inside,” Catra said at Adora’s confused look. “And your sketchbook was in your backpack and got wet, so she took it away and told me to tell you that I’m sorry.” 

Adora didn’t know what to say so she went with, “Oh.” Then she added, “I don’t care about the sketchbook. I’m sorry I left you out there.”

“Thanks.” 

“She’s not that bad, really,” Adora said. “She just has the way she likes doing things.”

“She’s a control freak, you mean,” Catra said. Adora tensed up automatically at the thought of what Shadow Weaver would say if she heard that. Catra swiped her towel across her hair, not appearing to accomplish anything other than tangling it worse, then turned and threw the towel aside, where it landed on the floor with a wet _splat_. “What did she want other people around for if she just wants things to go her way all the time?” 

Catra turned back around to look at Adora, who realized that she was actually meant to answer the question. “I don’t know.” 

“I think she likes how you do everything she wants all the time,” Catra said. 

Adora looked down, then nodded. 

“It’s okay,” said Catra. “Next time we want to do something fun, we’ll make sure she doesn’t find out.” 

Adora knew that she should object, but Catra sounded more sure of herself than Adora had ever felt, and instead, she smiled. 

* * *

Catra turned out to be good at not getting caught. The two of them spent the rest of the fall befriending the other neighborhood kids and playing at their houses - jumping off balconies into leaf piles, mashing up the weird red berries that grew on Rogelio’s dad’s bushes and making Kyle cry by pretending the berry juice was blood, and ineffectively trying to build a skateboard out of a piece of wood and old toy cars. In Shadow Weaver’s house Catra was quiet and polite to an extent that was pretty obviously obnoxious, but Shadow Weaver never questioned it. 

She did find things to yell at Catra about, though - not waking up for school on time, not doing her chores well enough or quickly enough or enthusiastically enough, not matching Adora’s near-perfect grades, painting her nails black, and, it seemed, sometimes, existing. 

It took about a month before Shadow Weaver’s relentless criticism ate enough into Catra’s pride that she snapped back. Adora was at the table getting started on homework when it happened, Catra across from her, and Shadow Weaver was looking through the kitchen to make sure it had been cleaned properly while Octavia finished wiping down the counters.

Shadow Weaver cleared her throat, and Adora automatically tensed up and stopped writing. Catra froze in place for a moment and glanced over at Shadow Weaver, who was glaring at the inside of the dishwasher, and then quietly went back to her homework. 

“Whose responsibility was it to empty the dishwasher this morning?” 

Adora knew that it was Catra’s. Shadow Weaver obviously knew that it was Catra’s, too, but she wanted someone else to say it. 

Catra pretended not to have heard her and kept her eyes fixed on her homework. She even actually seemed to be working on it. 

Shadow Weaver crossed the room and stood behind Catra, before pulling on her hair to force her head up. “You look at me when I speak to you.” 

“Why does it matter if I emptied it this morning? All of the dishes fit in perfectly fine,” Catra said. 

At that, Shadow Weaver yanked her up by her hair. “Ow!” Catra yelled, her pencil clattering to the floor. The outburst didn’t seem to phase Shadow Weaver at all, and something strange happened to Catra’s face as Shadow Weaver dragged her around the table toward the dishwasher. Her eyes narrowed and her lips flattened, pain morphing into defiance. 

“The dishes are crammed together in the same rack. They won’t be cleaned properly,” Shadow Weaver said. “You will unload the dishes from tonight and run the formerly clean ones through again. In four hours, you will empty the dishwasher and put the dirty dishes in correctly, and run it again.”

“Four hours? That’s midnight!” Catra said. “I have school!”

“You should have thought of that before you decided to neglect your household responsibilities,” Shadow Weaver said. 

Catra crossed her arms. “No.” 

Shadow Weaver’s grip on Catra’s hair tightened, jerking her closer. “What did you just say?” 

“I said no! The dishes are all in the dishwasher and they’ll get cleaned just fine. I’m not staying up until one in the morning to do the dishes again for no reason!” 

“ _You do not tell me no,”_ Shadow Weaver yelled, louder than Adora had heard her yell, directly into Catra’s ear. “You selfish brat! It’s no wonder no one else would have you!” 

For a second Catra’s expression wavered, and Adora’s thought that was going to be it. _Just say you’ll do it,_ Adora begged her internally. _Please, just say you’ll do it._

But Catra’s expression reset and she stared up at Shadow Weaver. “No.” 

Catra yelled again at Shadow Weaver’s next move, which was to yank her out of the kitchen and into the hallway. Adora sat frozen at the kitchen table as she heard Catra try to protest, then a door opening, a small body hitting a wall, a door slamming, and a key turning in a lock. 

Adora was still sitting frozen when Shadow Weaver returned alone. She walked over to Adora and stroked her hair, just once. “Finish your homework, Adora. Everything’s fine.” 

Adora finished her homework, and quietly finished Catra’s homework as well. That left her no reason to stay downstairs - Octavia was watching the TV, which Adora didn’t really like doing anyway, and Shadow Weaver was in the living room, probably reading. Adora stayed at the table, not willing to go upstairs when Catra was still wherever Shadow Weaver had put her. 

Eventually, Shadow Weaver stood up. Adora scrambled for an explanation that would satisfy her if she asked what Adora was still doing down here, but she ignored her and went into the hall. 

“It’s been an hour, Catra. If you’re ready to apologize, all you need to do is complete the task I’ve set for you and I’ll forgive you.” 

“No! I’m not doing it!” 

“Suit yourself.” Shadow Weaver walked back into the living room. 

This was stupid. Adora stood up and made her way to the dishwasher. She couldn’t tell which dishes had been there last night and which ones were new, so she decided to just take out every other dish to make all the rows less crowded. 

She had only stacked three of the plates in the sink when Shadow Weaver stood up again, walking toward the kitchen this time. Adora took a deep breath, reminded herself that she wasn’t doing anything wrong, and unloaded a fourth plate.

“And what exactly are you doing?”

“Unloading half of the dishes, just like you wanted.” Adora couldn’t quite stop her voice from wavering. 

Shadow Weaver’s expression grew colder. “That’s not your responsibility, Adora.” 

“I know, but it needs to be done, and Catra’s not doing it, and I really don’t mind.” 

Shadow Weaver stared at Adora so hard she almost apologized on principle, but before she could, Shadow Weaver knelt down and put a hand on Adora’s shoulder. Adora went still under it, and Shadow Weaver graced her with a hint of a smile. “Can I tell you a secret, Adora?” 

Adora nodded, because that’s what you always did when someone wanted to tell you a secret. 

“This isn’t about the dishes. If the dishes were very important, I could have unloaded them myself. This is about Catra not respecting me. I won’t be able to teach her anything if you do her chores whenever she doesn’t want to.” 

Shadow Weaver waited for Adora to nod again, then she took the plate out of her hand. “Go on up to bed, now.” 

Adora started toward the stairs, but hesitated. “How long are you going to leave Catra in there, if she doesn’t apologize?” 

Shadow Weaver looked right at Adora as she said, “As long as it takes.” 

Adora didn’t sleep much that night. When she was in bed with the lights off, she heard Shadow Weaver rap on the closet door again and tell Catra the same thing she’d told her before. Catra said a bad word and Shadow Weaver walked away. The next time Shadow Weaver went to the door, it was almost midnight and Catra didn’t say anything at all. Adora’s hands were clasped tightly around the blanket as she listened to Shadow Weaver unlocking the door. 

Then she heard someone, obviously Catra, running. It only took Shadow Weaver a few seconds to catch her, though, and something hit the wall or the floor, hard. 

Shadow Weaver said some things that were too quiet for Adora to hear. A few minutes later, Adora could hear dishes being stacked in the sink. 

Catra and Shadow Weaver both came upstairs after that, but Adora lay awake for a long time, wondering what Shadow Weaver could have said to Catra to make her change her mind. 

She woke up again when Shadow Weaver’s alarm went off at four AM and she went to bang on Catra’s door. Catra didn’t say anything at all as she went downstairs to empty the dishwasher and put the new dishes in, and Adora refused to go back to sleep until she was sure Catra was back in her room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have acquired a copy of harrow the ninth so posting will be slower than i originally anticipated. thanks for sticking with it!


	3. Chapter 3

Adora is hyperaware of Catra in the living room as she tries to fall asleep that night, even though she has to strain to actually hear her flipping through the TV channels. 

When the clock hits midnight, she gives up on attempting to sleep and opens her door. 

Catra’s stopped on the news - one of the, like, four channels they actually get - and she’s looking at her phone when Adora walks in and stops, lingering at the end of the hallway. Catra looks up when she sees her. 

Turning around, or making up some other excuse for being out here, is tempting, but Adora squashes the urge. “Can we talk?” 

“Okay.” Catra lowers her phone to the couch beside her. 

“I’m sorry,” Adora says, which is where she should have started. Catra is still, her expression wary. Adora’s heart plunges into her stomach, and she tries to remind herself that apologies don’t have to be accepted to be worth making. “I don’t have any excuses. When I left, I hurt you, and I’m sorry.” 

She wants Catra to reassure her - to tell her that it was perfectly reasonable to want to leave, that she was a child who’d had little power over the situation in the first place. She knows that that isn’t what she’s going to get. She understands that Catra could only see all the ways Adora failed her, and not how helpless she felt. 

Catra still looks wary, an expression that’s one conversational misstep away from combative, and Adora half-expects her to give in to her worst instincts and start yelling. But she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath, and she says, “Okay.” 

Adora kind of wants to yell now. She wants to demand to know what Catra’s thinking, what she wants from Adora if an apology isn’t enough. 

She makes herself wait. 

Eventually, Catra speaks. She’s looking at the ground, not at Adora, and Adora’s mind can’t decide if that’s better or worse. “You don’t need to apologize for leaving. I get that it was bad for you, too. No one should have had to live in that house.” 

“I’m still sorry,” she says. “I wish I’d done more. Done better.” 

Catra looks down again for a long, silent moment. “Thanks,” she says eventually. 

Adora braces herself and asks. “So what do I need to apologize for?” 

“I ran home from school every day for _months_ so that I could check the mail before she got to it,” Catra says, her gaze still fixed on the ground. “Me. I _ran_ back there. But you never sent a letter. You never called. I had no idea how to find you, but you knew where I was. And you just, just disappeared.” 

Cold floods Adora’s chest and she resists the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “I thought you hated me,” she says. 

“I hated you for like an hour, yeah,” Catra says. Her voice is rough now, like she’s on the edge of tears. “Can you blame me? But Adora, you were my best friend. I missed you.” 

Adora feels her own eyes start to burn. She chokes back her initial response - _I missed you too_ , while accurate, isn’t really an appropriate thing to say when all of this is squarely her fault. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, which is just as true, and incidentally, what Catra has actually asked her for. 

“How - what -” Catra’s mouth twists in a frown as she puts together what she wants to say. “Were you okay? After?” 

Adora walks further into the room and sits down on Glimmer’s soft plush chair, curling her legs under her. “I was fine, yeah. The next family was - not like with Shadow Weaver. I got moved around a lot after I left, but it was all - mostly - okay. I got into a program where I could have my own apartment when I turned sixteen, and that was better.” Catra looks closely at Adora, probably trying to see if she’s lying. Adora holds her gaze and gives her a small smile. “I was lucky. Shadow Weaver was probably the worst of them.”

Catra nods, picking up her phone just to flip it over and over in her hands. 

“How long did you stay there?” Adora asks, unable to quite look Catra in the eye as she does. 

“Not too long after you left, the neighbors called the cops on us during a fight and Lonnie and I both ended up getting moved,” Catra says with a shrug. “I was in a facility for a couple days and my aunt let me move back in with her after that. We didn’t get along great, and I moved out as soon as I turned eighteen, but it was better than _her_.” She grins. “You’re not going to believe this, but I still talk to Lonnie sometimes.” 

“Wait, seriously? How is she?” Adora had never been close to Lonnie, even though they’d lived together for nearly a year - the rivalry that had sprung up immediately between her and Catra had made anything else impossible. 

“She’s doing good. We lived together for a bit after she aged out and _that_ was a little much, but it’s...nice. To have someone.” 

Adora looks down and tries to swallow down a lump in her throat. She’s still absorbing that she could have been that person - could have called, could have sent Catra a letter from her new address, could have probably sent a message through Catra’s middle school email. Catra could have crashed on the floor of Adora’s apartment when she’d fought with her aunt - _or maybe in her bed_ , she thinks, before snuffing that train of thought. Adora could have had someone to help her move from her apartment into her college dorm instead of taking the bus through the city three times by herself to unpack and repack the same suitcase. So much time Adora had spent alone, when Catra could have been there with her, if she had only gotten over herself and called. 

_I missed you_ , she wants to say. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she goes with instead. 

Catra smiles, and it’s a smile Adora remembers. She smiles like all her worries and all her anger have ceased to exist, like there’s nothing important in the world except for Adora and the space between the two of them. Adora wonders, for a flicker of a moment, what her life might have been like if she had never had Catra look at her the way Catra does. 

“I’m glad I’m here, too,” she says.

* * *

Catra starts her new job the next day, leaving around two PM for her evening shift. Adora finishes her last class of the day at six and finds herself really alone for the first time since right after Glimmer left. 

She misses Catra _now_ , which is just ridiculous. Adora is used to being alone - she _is_. But it feels different now, somehow, than it did when she was sixteen and the best thing she could imagine in a living situation was peace and quiet. The apartment feels tiny and dull and pointless without Bow playing music and singing along in the kitchen, or Glimmer mumbling her thoughts out loud while typing an essay on the couch, or even Catra talking and laughing and drawing all of Adora’s senses to her just by existing. 

She gets up off the couch and tries to make dinner, but she forgets to set a timer because Bow has magical kitchen senses and never needs to, and by the time she remembers to pull her chicken nuggets out of the oven they’re completely charred. She throws them out and makes toast, which she can barely force herself to eat. 

She’s supposed to be good at this. She’s supposed to be competent and independent. She’s supposed to be able to entertain herself whenever she’s not doing work or chores, and she’s supposed to be okay with it. She isn’t supposed to ache to call Bow or Glimmer the second she’s alone in the apartment. She isn’t supposed to wish that Catra were here next to Adora in the tiny kitchen, standing so close she can feel the heat of her and laughing at Adora’s failure to cook a proper meal. 

She needs to be okay alone, because one day she’s going to lose them all like she’s lost everything else she’s ever had. Maybe campus won’t reopen in the fall and Bow will transfer to a school closer to home and their wake-up texts will go down to once a week, then once a month, then never. Maybe Glimmer will take a semester off to work for her mom and end up so successful she never comes back to school, and there will never be a right time for Adora to visit her. 

Catra...she’s only had Catra back for a few days, but it’s already harder to imagine her leaving. It’s strange - she’s been as prickly and quick to anger as Adora remembers, but Adora’s just as practiced at picking out the fondness in her sarcasm, the fears at the root of her anger. Despite everything, Catra seems to want to be around Adora, and no matter what else happens, Adora won’t let her slip away again. 

Thinking that way is more of a comfort than it probably should be. When she’d thought about her future before, she hadn’t really thought any farther ahead than this: college, a room of her own with a door that locks, a place to live where she gets a reasonable say in making the rules and the rules are things like “don’t ask Glimmer hard questions before her first cup of coffee” and “don’t try to fix the sink by yourself when it breaks, just call the landlord, Adora, _please_ ” and “only Bow gets to operate the hand mixer because he’s the only one who can do it without splattering batter all over the walls.”

When she adds Catra to the equation, it’s like a door opens and light spills in. She can imagine a future beyond the one she’s already living in. She thinks about meeting Scorpia, and getting the kind of job that gives her enough time and money to take vacations sometimes, and getting better at decorating, and maybe living somewhere nicer, like one of the pretty houses in the neighborhoods she runs through, with a balcony or even a garden. There’s no point to trying to imagine that all for just herself, but thinking about Catra being there, even sometimes, makes Adora want a future like that so much it scares her. 

Even Catra would think it was pathetic to want such simple things. Somehow she’d gotten through everything without losing the part of herself that believed that no matter what she did, things would be better one day. It hadn’t always served her well, in Shadow Weaver’s house, but by now Adora kind of envies it. 

She sighs. At some point she’d moved from moping at the table to moping on the couch, and Catra won’t be back until after Adora usually goes to bed. She thinks about texting Bow or Glimmer, but she doesn’t want to bother either of them with the kinds of things she’s been thinking about, and trying to talk about anything else sounds exhausting. 

Instead she grabs an old draft of an essay that she accidentally printed single-sided and takes the staple out so that she has slightly crumpled blank paper. She sits at the table outside the kitchen and draws a scene that she doesn’t have any pictures of, but knows by heart anyway: the kitchen, with the coffee makers lined up on their shelf, steam rising from a pot of boiling water on the stove, Bow’s phone hooked up to the speakers he’d taken home with him, dishes piled in the sink and cutting boards covering most of the meager countertops, and Bow, Glimmer and Adora, jostling around each other in the tiny space. 

She hasn’t drawn much at all since she left Shadow Weaver’s house - Shadow Weaver had always been proud of Adora’s art as if she’d made it herself, and Adora had only ever felt bad about it, towards the end. But Shadow Weaver isn’t here, and she draws and draws, adding little details like Bow singing along to the music as he stirs and Glimmer handing Adora a jar to open, Glimmer’s backpack discarded on the floor outside the kitchen like usual. 

She jerks upright when she hears a key in the lock and notices that it’s almost midnight. Catra raises her eyebrows when she opens the door, probably surprised to see Adora awake. 

“How was work?” Adora asks as Catra walks into the kitchen to fill a glass of water. 

“It was alright. It’s a job. Mostly I sit at a desk and fill out forms with someone on the phone. They’ve set up the entrance like an airlock they use to let animals through and not people, which everyone there seems to love. It’s the pet emergency room, though, so some gnarly stuff comes through.” 

Adora nods, not willing to ask for details. 

“You still draw?” Catra asks, walking closer to Adora. 

“Not often.” Adora leans back in her chair so that Catra can see the paper. 

“Those your roommates?” Catra asks. 

Adora nods. 

Catra looks at the drawing for long enough that Adora is tempted to snatch it off the table, as though Catra is somehow seeing something she shouldn’t. “You send it to them?” Catra asks eventually. 

“What? No way.” 

“Why not? It’s good.” 

“It’s unfair. If I send them this, they’ll know that I’m thinking about them and they’ll feel guilty for being at their real homes with their real families, and I don’t want that.” 

Catra rolls her eyes. “You think way too much.” 

Adora glares at her. As if Catra can tell Adora what she’s doing wrong, when Adora’s spent her whole life fighting for herself while Catra refused to. “I think exactly the right amount.” 

Catra narrows her eyes. “Something you want to say?” 

Adora shouldn’t take the bait. She knows what Catra’s trying to do: open herself up for attack, so that she can figure out how to strike back. She’s seen it enough times, rarely directed at her, but after the night she’s had, she’s primed to be egged on. “It’s rich for you to say I think too much when thinking and planning and making choices instead of excuses is the only reason I got where I am.” 

Adora can practically see Catra’s temper flare. She stands up straighter and looks directly at Adora. “You think _thinking_ got you where you are? You really want to tell me that you _thought_ before doing everything you could to become Shadow Weaver’s perfect little pet?” 

Adora stands up out of her seat. “What exactly are you saying?” 

Now that Adora’s risen to match her posture, Catra twirls away, leaving Adora feeling both silly and defensive. “I’m Adora,” Catra mocks in a bastardization of Adora’s voice. “Everyone I’ve ever met loves me! How am I ever going to cope? Oh, I know.” Her voice morphs back into her own, bringing with it a level of vitriol that Adora doesn’t think she herself has ever used. “I’ll get ahead by using the people who care about me and then abandoning them when something better comes along!” 

“You could have left, too. I told you that _that day._ You knew the system. You knew exactly what you had to say. If you hadn’t been so determined to beat Shadow Weaver at her games -”

Catra steps to stand right in front of Adora, making Adora look down on her. Adora doubts it has the effect she was intending. The twist of her mouth and her clenched fists send a clearer message. “You sure you want to finish that sentence?” 

Suddenly, Adora doesn’t. She shoulders past Catra and grabs Bow’s car key from the counter. 

“Adora! _Adora!_ Where are you going?” Catra’s voice is more desperate than angry already. 

Adora shuts the door behind her. 

_Where are you going_? 

That’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go. 

That doesn’t actually stop Adora from unlocking the car, starting the engine, and pulling out onto the road. She drives to campus, parks in an empty parking lot, and tries to control her heaving breaths. 

Her eyes are stinging with the impression of tears, but no matter how much or little she blinks she can’t quite make herself cry. She’s not even sure if she’s angry or sad or some combination. 

It had been unfair, to say that to Catra. Adora knows that the way Shadow Weaver treated them was a collection of interlocking mind games intended to get them under her control. But sometimes it feels like she’s going to spend her whole life learning it over and over and over again.

Maybe it’s better for Catra if Adora stays away from her after all. Maybe the two of them will never really be in a room alone together, with Shadow Weaver still in Adora’s head, pulling invisible strings, making her say things she doesn’t really mean. 

She clenches her fists hard enough that she can feel her short fingernails digging into her palms. She’d left because being alone is safest, it always has been. But she doesn’t want to be alone now. It used to be enough to be safe behind a locked door, but it doesn’t feel like enough now. 

She wants to go home. She wants to go back to the apartment and she wants Bow and Glimmer to be there. She feels so stupid for letting that place, those peope, feel like home when it’s never been home to them. 

Glimmer had told her to call if she needed anything, and she’d promised that she would. Bow has said, many times, that she can talk to him about whatever she wants to, the little she’d told him about her past always thick in the air around the conversation. 

She can’t lean on them like that. Not when she can't guarantee that they’ll still want to keep her around, after.

She can take care of herself. She can. Besides, she left her phone at the apartment. 

She rests her head carefully against the steering wheel, her breathing and heart rate finally feeling almost normal. She thinks about Catra. 

Is it bad of her to feel warm inside when she thinks about Catra waiting for her, worrying about her, wondering where she is? Catra, who had kept her close all that time even when Adora hadn’t managed to figure out how to do anything to deserve it. Who isn’t angry at Adora for leaving that house, even though Adora would understand if she had been. Who had asked, however rhetorically, where Adora was going even while they’d been fighting. 

She thinks about Catra, and she wants to go back. She wants to go home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i promise not _every_ chapter has a downer ending
> 
> Ch 2 flashbacks key points, if you skipped it: Shadow Weaver was controlling as a rule, but Adora responded to that by playing along while Catra questioned things. Shadow Weaver treated Catra badly, and wasn’t verbally or physically abusive to Adora, but used a lot of manipulative tactics to control her. Adora tried to defend Catra from Shadow Weaver but never managed to change Shadow Weaver’s behavior.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> moooore flashbacks, again with warnings for abusive and manipulative behavior towards children. more overt and escalating violence in this one.  
> (it also has catra and adora being cute)

Things got worse, after the dishwasher incident. Shadow Weaver was even harder on Catra, and Catra no longer tried to please her. It wasn’t a good combination - even with Octavia barely ever home between school and her job, there was almost never a day without Shadow Weaver yelling.

Catra always stopped short of defying Shadow Weaver badly enough for Shadow Weaver to lock her in the closet again, which Adora was very glad about. That was just about the only thing to be glad about. Shadow Weaver was the same as ever, and Catra was more sullen. She started getting into fights with Rogelio and the way she teased Kyle got meaner and meaner. By some miracle, she was always nice to Adora, even though Adora wasn’t getting any better at protecting her from Shadow Weaver. 

The summer after fifth grade included basically nothing but playing outside and listening to Shadow Weaver yell, and Adora was relieved to start school again in the fall. Sixth grade meant middle school, which meant she could sign up for after-school activities instead of going straight home, and she took them on enthusiastically - between soccer, art club, and math club, she was at school until late afternoon every day. 

Catra didn’t want to join soccer, art club, or math club. She wanted to hang out at the park next to the school and joke around with the other kids who hung out at the park. Shadow Weaver approved of soccer, art club, and math club. She didn’t approve of hanging out at the park, but couldn’t actually stop Catra from going there, so they just had screaming fights about it every evening. 

Octavia moved out halfway through the year, which Adora thought, for the weeks before it happened, might make things easier. It didn’t. Shadow Weaver didn’t yell any less, she just yelled at Catra even more and sometimes snapped at Adora. 

One day a few weeks after Octavia moved out, Adora got home before Catra. Shadow Weaver was waiting in the kitchen when she got back, and she narrowed her eyes when she saw that Adora was back alone. 

“Where’s Catra?” she asked.

“Hanging out with her friends, probably,” Adora said. 

Shadow Weaver nodded, something too thoughtful about it. “Do you have homework?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Go upstairs and get started on it.” 

Adora followed the instruction, at least as far as taking her homework out of her backpack and putting it on her desk. She was too nervous to actually get to work on it, when she could tell that Shadow Weaver was sitting downstairs thinking of the mean things she would say to Catra when she got back. 

Shadow Weaver waited until Catra closed the front door behind her to start in on it. “Where have you been?” 

“Hanging out at the park.” 

“ _Hanging out at the park_. Of course. You useless waste of space and time, you’d rather spend every day _hanging out at the park_ rather than make something of yourself.” 

“Yep. That’s right.” 

“You will not be hanging out at the park anymore.” 

“Whatever you say.” 

“I mean it. Tomorrow, if you do not come directly home after school, there will be consequences.” 

“Whatever.” 

“You have chores. Start them.” 

Adora heard Shadow Weaver stand up and her shoulders relaxed. That hadn’t been nearly as bad as she’d anticipated. She started on her homework, and got as much done as she could before going back downstairs to help cook dinner. 

The next day, Adora got home before Catra again. She tried to hide her surprise - she’d had a basketball game at a different school, so she was home way later than usual. Shadow Weaver didn’t say anything, though, so Adora took her cue and didn’t make a big deal of it. She took a shower and started her homework. 

When Catra got home, it was almost dark outside. Shadow Weaver didn’t say anything when she came in, so Adora hoped, for a moment, that she’d forgotten about ‘consequences.’

“You disrespectful little _shit_ ,” Shadow Weaver said, loud enough for Adora to easily hear from her room, in the moment after that moment. “You think you can do whatever you want, while you live in this house? I’ll show you that _I_ make the rules. _I_ decide what you do and don’t do.” Adora tensed as she heard a brief scuffle, then a door opening and slamming. “I’ll make sure you learn,” Shadow Weaver said. “One way or another, I’ll make sure.” 

Adora stayed at her desk, heart pounding, for the next few minutes, wanting to go downstairs and help somehow, but as clueless as always about what to do. Soon enough, she noticed that it was about time to go downstairs to help with dinner. She could help with dinner, be on her best behavior, and talk to Shadow Weaver, and maybe Shadow Weaver would calm down. 

Shadow Weaver seemed to be perfectly calm already when Adora got downstairs, and she let Adora pick between pork chops and pasta for dinner. Adora couldn’t figure out a way to bring up Catra until they were sitting down. “Will Catra be joining us?” she asked, eyes on her plate. 

“Catra needs to learn a lesson, Adora. We’ve talked about this.” 

That was obviously a _no_. “How long will she be in there?” Adora asked. 

“Until it’s time for you to leave for school in the morning.” 

Adora’s jaw dropped. “All night?” 

“You’ve been such a good member of this household, you haven’t really had to understand what privileges you have,” Shadow Weaver said. “Eating dinner with me is a privilege. Your nice room and everything you have in it is a privilege. Going outside is a privilege. Spending more time at school than you are required to is a privilege. Understand?” 

Adora nodded. She hadn’t realized that Shadow Weaver could forbid her from going to clubs and sports after school, but that had been silly of her. Of course she could. 

“Catra will have those privileges when she learns how to behave,” Shadow Weaver finished. “Don’t be frightened, Adora. You’re setting an excellent example.” 

Adora looked down at her plate of pasta and thought about Catra, alone in the dark. 

“Eat,” said Shadow Weaver.

* * *

After that, Shadow Weaver locked Catra in the closet a lot. It was never for more than a night during the school year, but as summer approached again, Adora started to get nervous. During summer, Shadow Weaver could lock Catra up for days and days and only Adora would know about it, and she had never managed to change Shadow Weaver’s opinion on a punishment, no matter how hard she tried. 

She started having nightmares about it, and woke up more than once to Catra standing over her, having shaken her awake in the middle of the night. Weirdly, Adora came to treasure those nights, because they always ended up with Catra climbing into Adora’s bed and staying there next to her until she fell asleep again. 

Some of those nights, they talked. Catra told Adora about her aunts, who had passed her back and forth between them before both of them eventually got fed up with her and she’d ended up with Shadow Weaver. Adora told Catra about her grandmother dying and trying to take care of herself and her grandfather for the next year as he got sicker and sicker. Catra asked questions like “What would you be doing right now, if you could do whatever you wanted?” and Adora tried to answer them. They never talked about Shadow Weaver, and Adora felt bigger and freer than she ever did during daytime.

It turned out that Adora didn’t have to worry about being the only one in the house who could get between Catra and Shadow Weaver, because at the start of the summer, Lonnie moved into Octavia’s old room. 

Lonnie’s presence helped a little, but not much. Shadow Weaver didn’t lock Catra in the closet for a while after she got there, even when she did things like stay out after dark that _definitely_ would have gotten her locked in the closet before. She still yelled, but didn’t say swear words, even though Lonnie was only a year younger than Adora and Catra and she’d definitely been swearing at Catra when they were eleven. 

Lonnie was more like Adora than Catra with Shadow Weaver, which was a big relief. Lonnie was polite and didn’t mind doing chores, so like Adora, Shadow Weaver pretty much let her do whatever she wanted. She made friends with the neighborhood boys, who accepted Adora and Catra back into their group even though they hadn’t hung out much all year. All of this would have been great, and it would have made for a perfectly fine summer, except Catra _hated_ Lonnie. 

Adora tried not to take sides, at first, but it became more and more clear that Lonnie had never done anything to invite Catra’s vocal dislike, and Adora had taken Catra’s side by treating it like it was an equal rivalry. 

The boys sided with Lonnie, and Adora understood why. “Why don’t you want to be friends with Lonnie?” Adora asked one day. She and Catra were hanging out in Shadow Weaver’s backyard by themselves, while Lonnie, Kyle and Rogelio were off doing something probably a lot more fun. 

“Because she’s a stuck-up goody two-shoes,” Catra said, not moving from her spot lying between flower beds. Adora carefully dribbled her soccer ball between Catra and the flowers. 

“I’m a stuck-up goody two-shoes,” she said. 

“Yeah, but you’re not faking it.” 

Adora dribbled the ball in another circle. “Yes I am.” 

“No.” Catra reached up and grabbed Adora’s hand. Adora stopped in her tracks and let the ball roll gently into the flowers. “You’re not faking being a good person because you like to open your window at night and do sports after school so you don’t have to be around Shadow Weaver. You’re a good person because you’re nice to everyone and you care about everyone else’s happiness more than your own. You’re a better person than Shadow Weaver. Lonnie is just good at playing her game.” 

Adora sat down next to Catra, who retracted her hand to fling it over her face. “You don’t think Lonnie is a good person?” 

“Nope.”

“We really haven’t known her that long.”

“You didn’t see the way she looked at me, when she first got here. She could tell that I’m the one Shadow Weaver hates most, and I could see her thinking, _if Shadow Weaver hates her more than she hates me, I’m safe_.” 

“Can you blame her?” Adora asked, quiet enough that Catra could pretend not to hear it, if she wanted to. 

“Of course not,” Catra said. “I’d have done the same thing.” 

A week later, Shadow Weaver locked Catra in the closet for hitting Lonnie, and the respite was over. The night after that, Catra shook Adora awake in the middle of the night. 

“Run away with me.” 

“What, now?” 

“Yes. Now. We can steal some money and buy bus tickets. If we promise to help around the house and babysit the younger kids, my aunt will let us stay with them until we’re fourteen and we can get real jobs and buy a house.” 

For a moment, Adora seriously considered it. It wasn’t too bad, as far as plans went. But the bus station was miles away, and Adora doubted that Shadow Weaver had enough cash in her purse for two bus tickets, and she didn’t even know where Catra’s aunt lived. “Catra, we can’t. We’d get caught.” 

“Maybe. Maybe not.” 

Adora hugged her blanket to her chest and admitted her real objection. “I don’t want to.” 

“ _What_?” 

“Shadow Weaver’s done so much for me -”

“You think she actually cares about you?” Catra asked, loud enough to make Adora shush her. She climbed into bed beside Adora, a familiar position for whispered conversation. 

“I don’t need her to care about me,” Adora said.

“Then what do you need? What do you _want_?”

“That doesn’t matter!”

“Yes, it does.” 

Adora started to shake her head, but Catra’s hands covering hers stopped her. 

“It does matter,” Catra said. “One day you’re going to get out of here and you’re going to be able to do whatever you want, which means you have to want _something_.”

What did Adora want? It would be nice to live in a place where she wasn’t shivering from the air conditioning in the summer, where she could run around outside instead of tiptoeing around flower gardens, where she could make a mess and clean it up after without worrying about getting yelled at in between, where no one would ever be mean to Catra. 

She wondered what Catra would think of the fact that she was there in the future Adora was imagining. 

“I need to go to school,” she said instead. “I need to get really good grades and get a scholarship to college and _then_ buy a house.”

“Is that what you _want_?” Catra asked. 

Adora didn’t know how to say that all she really wanted was to be near Catra. That she would run away with her in a heartbeat, if it really meant that they would be safe. So she just hugged her as tight as she could. “Okay,” Catra said. “Okay, we won’t go.” 

* * *

Seventh grade started pretty much the same as sixth grade. Adora went to sports and clubs after school and Lonnie did the same. Catra hung out at the park and the mall and other kids’ houses, and Shadow Weaver would yell at her and sometimes lock her up, and all of them carried on as if it didn’t happen. 

It wasn’t until the spring that Shadow Weaver decided that Catra needed to be taught a harsher lesson. Catra got home while the rest of them were eating dinner and sighed when Shadow Weaver stood up from the table so fast her chair clattered. “Get out.” 

“What?” 

“If you don’t appreciate my hospitality, you are not welcome in my home. Get _out_. Perhaps I’ll let you back inside in the morning.” 

“Shadow Weaver -” Adora protested without even thinking. 

“Stay out of this,” Shadow Weaver said, shoving her palm towards Adora’s face, so close she couldn’t help but flinch. 

“You’re not allowed to kick me out. That’s the whole point,” Catra said. Her voice was measured, almost bored, but Adora knew all of Catra’s voices. She was scared.

“I’m not kicking you out. I’m giving you an opportunity to reflect on your behavior overnight in the backyard,” Shadow Weaver said, striding toward Catra. She seized her by the arm and pulled her toward the back door. “Perhaps you’ll learn to think before acting.” She opened the door and threw Catra out so hard she landed on the ground and rolled. 

Adora stood up out of her seat. “Shadow Weaver -”

“Do you have something to say, Adora?” With the door now locked, Shadow Weaver’s full attention was on Adora. 

“It’s going to be cold tonight,” was all Adora could come up with. 

“Yes, it will be cold. If it was going to be a pleasant night, it wouldn’t be an appropriate punishment,” Shadow Weaver said. “Now sit _down._ ” 

Adora looked at Lonnie, who had watched the proceedings with quiet alertness. She looked at Shadow Weaver, whose steely gaze was still turned on Adora. She thought about Catra rolling across the rain-damp ground outside, Catra letting Adora throw mud at her to cheer her up, Catra calling Adora a good person. 

She sat down. 

A little bit after Shadow Weaver went to bed, she snuck downstairs, her two thickest sweatshirts under her arm. She made a sandwich and filled up a water bottle as quietly as she could in the kitchen and brought it all out the back door, which she closed carefully behind her. 

“Catra?” she whispered. She shouldn’t have bothered. In one corner of the yard, there was a figure, much too large to be a squirrel, tearing up one of Shadow Weaver’s flower beds. “Catra!” 

She raced over to that part of the yard. Catra grinned at her before turning back to making a mess of the flowers. “Hey, Adora,” she said. She looked at the bundle of clothes under Adora’s arm. “Finally decide to make a run for it?” 

Adora put the sweatshirts, sandwich, and water down next to Catra. “You have to stop,” she said. 

“Stop what?” Catra yanked another bunch of flowers out of the ground, roots and all, then snapped the stems for good measure. 

“ _Catra_.” 

“No. She thinks she’s been teaching me something, all this time? Well I haven’t learned anything. It’s time to teach her a lesson.” 

“Catra, please. I don’t want her to hurt you.” 

Catra turned toward Adora again. “I don’t care what she does to me, as long as I get to see her face when she sees this.” She tore out another bunch of flowers. 

Adora’s heart pounded. Just like she’d never been able to convince Shadow Weaver of anything, she’d never managed to change Catra’s mind when she was set on a course either. There was only one way Adora might be able to help her. 

She knelt down next to Catra on grass that was already wet with dew, grabbed a fistful of flowers, and yanked. 

It was still fully dark out when they finished tearing up the last of the flower beds, and they settled down to sleep close together using Adora’s sweatshirts as blankets. Adora knew that they’d done something terrible, but somehow, pressed up against Catra, she didn’t feel scared. 

She woke up to a scream, and as she blinked her eyes open, she couldn’t tell if it had been Catra or Shadow Weaver. Shadow Weaver had pulled Catra away from Adora and thrown her to the ground, and as Adora sat up she grabbed Catra by the front of her shirt and slammed her against the big tree. “You -”

“Shadow Weaver, no!” Adora said. “It was my fault, too.” She took a deep breath. “It was my idea.” 

Shadow Weaver turned to Adora, and for half a second, Adora thought her plan had worked - that she’d be the one to face Shadow Weaver’s wrath this time. But Shadow Weaver never let go of Catra, and when she turned back to where she was holding her, it was to slap her across the face, hard enough to knock her head back into the tree. 

“You haven’t only ruined years of work on my part, you haven’t only ruined your own life with your refusal to obey, you’ve dragged Adora down with you. What does it feel like to ruin everything you touch?” 

Catra smiled, and Adora’s stomach curdled with dread. “Look in the mirror and tell me,” Catra said. 

Shadow Weaver grabbed Catra by her hair and slammed her head against the tree. “I could kill you right now and I’d be doing the world a favor,” she said. 

“Shadow Weaver, please, stop!” Adora said. She ran toward Shadow Weaver and grabbed on to her elbow. 

Shadow Weaver tried to shake her off, but Adora just tightened her grip. “This isn’t any of your business, Adora,” she said in a voice that once would have made Adora stop doing whatever she was doing. 

But there was blood on Catra’s cheek from being scraped against the bark. Adora held on. 

“I know you don’t care about me,” Shadow Weaver said, her voice the deceptively gentle one she usually used with Adora. This time, though, she was talking to Catra. “Despite everything I’ve done for you, you refuse to respect me or even thank me. But I thought you cared about Adora. And by some miracle, she cares about you. Look how much you’re upsetting her.”

“Catra didn’t -”

“Apologize to Adora,” said Shadow Weaver. “Or I will make your life unbearable.” 

She paused, apparently set in that ultimatum. Adora looked around Shadow Weaver’s sleeve at Catra, who was looking at her. 

_Just say it_ , Adora tried to beg without words. _I know you’re not sorry, but you just have to say it_.

“I’m not sorry,” said Catra. 

Shadow Weaver threw her down with so much force Adora lost her grip too. She fell and landed in a clump of dying flowers. When she got to her feet, Shadow Weaver was dragging Catra back toward the house, Catra resisting her and straining to get away. 

Adora stayed in the backyard, from where she could dimly hear the sounds of Catra being locked in the closet. She waited a while for Shadow Weaver to come back and deal with her, but as the sun rose higher and higher, she realized that Shadow Weaver wasn’t coming. 

She went inside. Shadow Weaver was at the table, where Lonnie was showing her a form she had to sign for a school field trip, and she barely glanced up when Adora walked in. 

It wasn’t fair. It had never been fair, and Adora had never felt more useless. What was the point of being a good person if she couldn’t even keep Catra safe? 

That was Sunday morning. By evening, Catra apologized and Shadow Weaver let her out and followed her around until the middle of the night to make sure she did all her chores and homework. Adora tried to stay near them, but Shadow Weaver didn’t yell again, and she only grabbed Catra when she tried to use the wrong cleaner on the windows. It was like she wanted both of them to just forget about it. 

The next day at school, Adora went to the counselor’s office and asked to use their phone. She called Claire and told her that Shadow Weaver had hit Catra. She didn’t say why - Claire had once told Adora that no reason was a good enough reason, and Adora could only hope that she believed it. 

That same afternoon, Claire and a few other adults came to the house. Catra wasn’t home yet, and Lonnie didn’t come down from her room, so Adora and Shadow Weaver sat down with them at the kitchen table. 

Shadow Weaver told them what had happened. “I lost my temper,” she said after describing how she’d slapped Catra. “Catra has always been troubled and difficult, but I had never hit her before. Isn’t that right, Adora?”

Adora thought about all the times Shadow Weaver had grabbed Catra by the hair hard enough to make her cry out, thrown her against walls, twisted her arm behind her back, and held onto her wrist hard enough to leave marks. That was something, right? She hadn’t done those things to Adora. 

But Shadow Weaver was right that it wasn’t technically hitting. Adora nodded.

“Adora is a good girl,” Shadow Weaver said. “It was very kind of her to make a report on Catra’s behalf.” 

“It sounds like everything’s okay here,” one of the adults Adora didn’t know said. 

“To be honest, the only worry I have is about Adora’s exposure to that kind of behavior,” Shadow Weaver said. “They’ve grown close, and I think it might be best if they were separated.” 

“We’ll take that under advisement,” Claire said. She turned to Adora. “Anything else you want to tell us?” 

She wanted to tell Claire that it wasn’t fair, that Catra was only bad because Shadow Weaver’s rules didn’t make sense to her, that Shadow Weaver hadn’t lost her temper at all. But she didn’t quite have the words for any of it. “No.” 

“Then we’ll follow up soon,” one of the other adults said. Shadow Weaver showed them to the door and Adora stayed in the kitchen, hands curled tightly against the chair. 

“I don’t want to be separated from Catra,” Adora said when Shadow Weaver came back. Shadow Weaver had never listened to her, not once, and especially not about Catra, but she still wanted to say it. Usually it was terrifying every time Adora reminded Shadow Weaver, usually unintentionally, that she wasn’t exactly the version of herself Shadow Weaver wanted her to be. Today, it wasn't. 

“I know, Adora,” she said, sitting back down next to her and putting a hand on her shoulder. Adora tried not to stiffen under it. “But you’re young. You don’t know what you want, not really. I’m the one who takes care of you, and I know what’s best for you. You’ll do so much better when Catra’s gone.” 

When Adora nodded, it was mostly to make Shadow Weaver get her hand off of her shoulder. 

A few days after that, Claire showed up again, alone. “Adora, pack your stuff. You’re going to be moving to a different house,” she said. 

“What?” Adora said. Shadow Weaver had said that _Catra_ would be the one moving. 

“But Adora has been thriving here,” Shadow Weaver said, intense but clearly trying for reasonable in a way she never bothered with for the kids. “She’s been with me nearly three years, and she’s been doing well in school, getting involved in sports - she doesn’t need to move.” 

“You said you wanted them separated and we only have space for a low-risk child in their age group,” Claire said. Shadow Weaver’s jaw tightened. 

Claire looked at Adora, who was almost as tall as her now. “Do you want to stay here?” she asked. 

“I -” Adora froze. Shadow Weaver telling her she didn’t know how to want the right things yet, Catra asking her over and over what she _did_ want and Adora fumbling her answers, the tense evenings of listening to Shadow Weaver yell and sleepless nights spent worrying about Catra, all rushed through her mind.

Shadow Weaver didn’t want her, not really - she just wanted someone who would obey her. And she’d never been able to help Catra, not once. All she ever seemed to do was make things worse.

And if she stayed, that would mean that Shadow Weaver would have all the more reason to think that the things she believed were true - that Adora deserved to be treated better because she said and did whatever Shadow Weaver wanted, that what Shadow Weaver wanted really was the most important thing in the world. Leaving was the only thing she could do that could possibly show her that Adora didn’t believe those things. Adora didn’t belong here. She never had, no matter how much she’d wanted to when Shadow Weaver had first smiled at her. 

It was hard to imagine belonging anywhere else, either, but when she thought about another five years of cold rooms and threats and fear and shouting, the _anywhere else_ Claire was offering seemed to shine in comparison.

She thought about Catra. She thought about setting a good example.

She looked up at Claire and shook her head. 

“Pack your things,” Claire said, gentler this time.

Adora caught a glimpse of Shadow Weaver’s stony face as she walked up the stairs, hands trembling. When she was on the stairs, she heard Catra come in the front door. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Adora has decided to leave us,” Shadow Weaver said, her voice sad as Adora had ever heard it, as though she actually cared. Adora knew that she didn’t. If Shadow Weaver cared about her, she would have let her buy decorations for her room and gone to her soccer and basketball games and listened to her when she said things. Like Catra always said, she only liked Adora because she did whatever Shadow Weaver wanted. But still, Adora’s eyes started to burn with tears at her words. 

Catra bounded up the stairs after Adora and caught her wrist as she was walking into her room. “What are you doing?” 

“I’m leaving,” she said. “You can leave, too. Just tell your caseworker what happened and they’ll move you, or you can run away and live with your aunt like you wanted.” 

“That was never going to work,” Catra said. Her hand slid from Adora’s wrist to grasp her hand, so tight that Adora didn’t think she could pull away if she tried. “Don’t go. Just stay with me. Everything will be okay if we stay together.” 

“Everything isn’t okay now!” Adora said, her tears finally starting to spill. “It’s never been okay!” 

“It will be, one day,” Catra said. “We’ll find a way to show her that she doesn’t matter any more than the rest of us. Just please, stay.” 

Adora shook her head, her hand starting to go numb in Catra’s grip. “No.” 

“You’re really just going to leave me here?” 

“I just said, you can -”

“You don’t get it! That’s not going to work! Not for me. People don’t listen to me the way they listen to you.”

 _You don’t listen to me. Shadow Weaver doesn’t listen to me_. “Then maybe you should be more like me,” Adora said. It was a horrible thing to say, the kind of thing that only Shadow Weaver usually said, but Catra was usually only this stubborn when she was talking to Shadow Weaver. 

Her grip on Adora’s hand loosened, and Adora pulled away.

Catra stepped back as Adora started to shove clothes into her suitcase. “You’re really just going to leave me. I can’t believe you’re this selfish.” 

Adora stopped packing to turn and stare at Catra. _Selfish_ was a word Shadow Weaver used a lot, but Adora had never heard it turned on her. 

“You’ve never cared about me, have you? You just wanted to be my friend so you’d feel better about being Shadow Weaver’s favorite. Go ahead and leave! I never want to see you again anyway! I hate you!” 

Adora barely had time to open her mouth to reply before Catra ran into her room and slammed the door. 

Catra probably hadn’t wanted her to say anything anyway. 

Adora packed her things. She dragged her suitcase and school backpack downstairs. She left. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos to all of you for getting through that! next chapter is _finally_ an upswing


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spoiler: there is a cat! there is also a brief scene involving a cat in danger. if you'd like to know the details of that going in, click through to the end notes.

Adora starts the car and drives back. 

Catra’s on the couch when she gets there and she stands up as Adora closes the door behind her. She walks toward Adora, who freezes in place, half-expecting Catra to still be angry. But the corners of her mouth are turned down and when she reaches Adora, she hugs her. 

Adora relaxes and hugs her back, and she wants to never let go. Catra’s new short hair brushes against Adora’s cheek and her arms hold her in place, standing there in her apartment that’s the kind of apartment she dreamed about, once, and that really is just empty rooms without her friends. 

That’s not nothing. She’s alive and safe, at least. But it feels like something is breaking in Adora, and now she can’t help but want more. 

And Catra’s here, right here, and that makes her need to brace herself to be alone again feel so much less immediate. Catra’s arms around her make her feel like maybe it’s even okay. 

“I’m sorry,” Adora says.

“Don’t leave like that again,” Catra says. “Please.” 

It terrifies her to make that promise, to let go of the out she can take to remind herself how to be alone while she still has a choice about it, but she also wants to. It’s like jumping off a cliff without being sure what’s at the bottom and she wants, more than anything, to find out. “Okay. Okay, I won’t.” 

Catra steps back, just a little, and looks at Adora. She takes her hand and pulls her over to the couch, where Adora sits down beside her. “You still don’t get it,” she says. 

She doesn’t sound angry anymore, but the thought of resuming their conversation makes Adora’s stomach clench with dread. “Catra, I really don’t want to -”

“I need you to hear this. You don’t have to say anything back if you don’t want to.” She inhales and examines Adora in a way that makes Adora want to bury herself back in Catra’s arms. Adora nods her along. “You shouldn’t have had to be perfect. You shouldn’t have had to do and say whatever she wanted to avoid being yelled at and threatened and punished. She wanted you to be a thing, not a person, and it hurt you every day.” Adora turns away, her eyes starting to burn. Catra takes her hand again. “I got mad because you still think that trying that hard to please her was the right thing to do. That anyone - that _I_ could have been treated like you if I’d just _behaved_.” Adora has never heard more vitriol in that word. “You know I tried sometimes, right? And no matter how hard I tried, she still found something wrong with me. She never would have let me be what you were. She wanted me to be a problem that she could blame all of her own problems on.”

“You’re saying it was just - what, luck?” 

“No. It’s that you’re smart, and you’re motivated, and you’re good at talking to people, and something about you makes everyone around you want to see you succeed. I never liked school and sometimes I don’t like doing much of anything and I get angry and people see all that and give up on me.”

“Catra -”

Catra shakes her head and continues. “I sometimes still have to convince myself that it shouldn’t be that way, that I shouldn’t have to be perfect for people to help me or care about me. You don’t get to tell me I’m wrong about that.” 

Adora nods, not quite able to meet Catra’s eyes. 

“But also...I don’t want you to believe it either. You deserve to have people who love you for everything about you, not just because you don’t cause any problems.” 

Adora knows that, intellectually. She remembers all the foster parents who had told her how easy she was and how she had always regarded it as a compliment; she remembers Shadow Weaver calling her mature and responsible and ‘good’, she remembers her caseworker asking if she was sure independent housing was the best choice for her, telling her that the families she’d stayed with didn’t _mind_ having her around. 

And all of it had only gotten her here, to this apartment that would be nothing more than an empty apartment if Catra hadn’t happened to need a new place to stay. 

“Why does it matter what we deserve if we might not ever get it?” she asks.

Catra shrugs. Adora feels her hand shift slightly where Catra’s still holding on to it. She raises her eyes, which are probably red with a hint of tears, to meet Catra's. “It matters because it matters,” Catra says.

Adora knows what she means - that it matters because she matters. Adora doesn’t really believe that, but it's obvious that Catra believes it, and that’s something. It feels like something important. 

* * *

A few days later, Catra texts Adora from work while Adora’s getting ready for bed. 

_ >> does our lease say anything about cats? _

Adora stops to roll her eyes before responding. 

_ >> Yes. It says they’re not allowed. _

_ >> cool. i’m getting a cat _

_ >> I said they’re NOT allowed. _

_ >> so we won’t let the landlord find out. _

Adora buries her face in her pillow and groans. She can already tell that it will be useless to try to talk Catra out of this. 

Catra texts her again. 

_ >> don’t worry you’ll love him. _

Adora falls asleep before Catra gets home and when she gets up to run in the morning, she opens her bedroom door to find a gray cat on the other side, looking up at her with wise and unimpressed blue eyes. She reaches a finger down and the cat deigns to sniff it and rub against the side of her hand. Adora snaps a picture and sends it to Bow, who calls her on Facetime before Adora makes it out the door. 

“You got a cat!” he says. Adora cringes. With the phone on speaker, it’s probably loud enough to wake Catra. 

“Catra got a cat,” Adora says, pointing the camera at said cat, who’s now on the kitchen table, batting around a pencil that Adora had left there after a class yesterday. “I just met him.” 

“He’s _purr-_ fect,” Bow coos as the cat succeeds in knocking Adora’s pencil off the table and leaps down after it. 

“He is pretty cute,” Adora says. As if he’d heard her, the cat walks over to Adora and rubs against her leg. Bow’s _“awwww_ ” goes on for several seconds before Adora turns off her video. “Let’s get going. I’ll send you a million pictures later.” 

“It better be a million. I’ll be counting,” Bow says. “Have a good run.” 

“You too.” 

It’s raining outside this morning, so Adora keeps her run short. The cat comes up to her when she gets back, but when she tries to pet him with her wet hand, he backs away. She texts a picture to Bow and gets in the shower. 

When she leaves her room to grab breakfast before starting her schoolwork, Catra is on the couch, the cat stretched out on her stomach and purring loudly enough for Adora to hear all the way across the room. Catra’s eyes are closed and her expression is one Adora has barely seen on her before - happy and relaxed at the same time. 

Quietly, she takes out her phone and snaps a picture. 

Catra opens her eyes and looks at Adora as she crosses the room to get to the kitchen. The cat does exactly the same thing, almost uncannily. 

“What’s his story?” Adora asks as she pours herself cereal and fills the kettle for tea. Seeing that the French press is still on its shelf, she adds enough water for that, too. 

Catra moves her hand to scratch behind the cat’s ears. His purring gets even louder. “Someone called the hospital last night wanting to drop him off and rehome him, which we don’t actually do, and the Humane Society charges a fee. They only got Melog a few weeks ago - his original owners were students who had to leave town when the school closed and couldn’t take him home. The person the students dropped them with has someone new moving into their place who’s super allergic to cats, and she had to move in immediately, so they had to find a new place for Melog last night or toss him out on the streets. How was I supposed to say no to this face?” She picks the cat up halfway and points his face, which is awfully cute, toward Adora.

“Who named him Melog?” Adora asks. 

“It’s a good name!” Catra says defensively, which means it was her. She puts Melog back down on top of her, where he stays, and resumes petting him.

Adora makes her tea and makes coffee for Catra and drops the mug off next to her before bringing her breakfast to the table and opening her laptop. She can’t stop sneaking glances across the room at Catra and Melog as she tries to take notes on her geology lecture. Something warm flares in her chest every time. 

* * *

Adora and Catra cook dinner together on Catra’s first night off after adopting Melog. They step around each other to get to everything in the kitchen and have a brief and halfhearted (at least on Adora’s end) argument about whether Melog should be allowed on the counters. Adora hooks her laptop up to the TV to stream a zombie movie and, thinking about Melog on Catra’s lap more than anything, sits down next to Catra on the couch instead of taking the chair. 

Catra smiles at her, something private and lingering about it, and Adora flips the light switch off because she’s blushing and doesn’t want Catra to see. 

Melog stays on Catra’s lap the whole movie, but doesn’t protest when Adora reaches over to pet him. Catra smiles each time she does, and it feels good. It feels like home. 

When they’re cleaning up from cooking, after, Adora glances over from where she’s spooning leftovers into Tupperwares and can tell on sight that Catra’s washing the dishes with lukewarm water. “Turn the handle on the sink all the way to the left,” she says. “Nothing’s going to actually get clean like that.” 

Catra freezes, just for a moment. “Then I wonder what the fuck soap is for,” she says. 

“It’s for killing germs, but there’s no point in using any if the water’s too cold to rinse the dishes properly.” For a second, Adora forgets who she’s arguing with. This sort of thing would be harmless if it was Glimmer - or Bow, but it’s usually Bow who has to explain this sort of thing to Adora.

“Believe it or not, I’ve washed dishes before, and I’m perfectly capable of handling it.” 

“I never said you’re not capable of handling it, I’m trying to explain a way to make it easier.”

“I don’t need your help!” Catra scrubs angrily at the dish, hard enough that it slips from her grasp, plunges into the sink, and breaks. 

Everything feels frozen for a moment, long enough for Adora to reshuffle her priorities. Then Catra whirls around, fast enough that a few soap bubbles fly off her hands. “I’m sorry!” 

“There’s no need to be sorry, Bow got these plates for like a dollar at Goodwill and we have plenty of them,” Adora says. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes,” Catra says, too quickly. Her hands are shaking but not bleeding, so Adora pulls over the trash can and steps up to the sink, turning off the water and then carefully picking up the pieces of broken ceramic and placing them in the trash. 

She doesn’t look at Catra again until she’s finished. Catra has her hands clenched into fists and her arms crossed, and she’s looking at Adora, expression more vulnerable than Adora’s used to. 

“What can I do to help right now?” Adora asks. 

Catra’s eyes go wide like she’s surprised, and Adora suddenly wants to stab everyone in Catra’s life who made Adora’s _basic decency_ register as unexpected. That’s not what’s important right now, though, because once Catra gets over it she responds, “Come here and tell me again you’re not mad at me?” 

Adora steps in to hug her, and feels something soften in her own chest when Catra’s arms uncurl to settle around Adora’s waist. “I’m not mad at you,” she says. 

They stay like that for - a while. Long enough that Adora starts to wonder if there’s a word more accurate than “hugging” for what’s actually “cuddling while standing up.” Catra’s hands stop shaking, and her breath slows down, but neither of them move to let go. 

When Melog brushes up against their ankles, Catra gently headbutts Adora in the collarbone, which feels as affectionate as it is objectively ridiculous. Catra breaks away to give Melog a few treats and Adora turns back to the leftovers. 

“What would be the best thing for me to do if something like that happens again?” Adora asks when Catra straightens up to put the bag of cat treats away. 

She pauses in her tracks and looks at Adora, and it takes effort for Adora to keep her hands on her task under Catra’s scrutiny. She’s rewarded with Catra’s reply after a few seconds of staring. “If I’m doing something wrong - like, you were right, about the water, I’ll be more careful about that - I just need you to shut up, for a minute. I’m a lot better at arguing than I am at negotiating, so I just need time to work through that on my own before I say anything about it out loud. Why are you smiling?”

Adora tries to wipe the smile off her face and can’t. “You’re so grown up.”

“Get that stupid grin off your face! You asked, you paragon of emotional maturity.” 

“Is that supposed to be an insult?”

“Yes. No. Shut up and let me finish the damn dishes!” 

Adora’s still smiling as Catra turns back to the sink. 

* * *

Later that week, she’s home by herself in the evening, half watching a movie and half browsing the internet, when the illusions of home and belonging she’s been building are finally yanked away.

It’s a post on Instagram, from Glimmer. The post is a screenshot of a video call, featuring Bow sitting cross-legged on his bed at home, strumming his ukelele and singing enthusiastically, with Glimmer giggling in her own panel in the corner. _Best friends can cheer you up even from a distance,_ the caption says. 

She stares at it for longer than she should, trying to talk herself out of crying. There’s nothing wrong with Bow and Glimmer hanging out without her - they’ve been friends for longer than anyone alive has even known Adora. It’s completely natural that they’d want to hang out without her sometimes. Sure, maybe the picture of them laughing together over video chat while Adora sits alone in the apartment that was supposed to be all of theirs is making Adora feel more alone than she ever has, but that’s Adora’s own problem. 

She slams her laptop shut and buries her head in her hands. It had been a mistake to want things she couldn’t have and she’d _known_ that, she’d known that this whole time. She admits it to herself, in so many words, now, in an attempt to snuff it out of her heart once and for all: she wants Bow and Glimmer to be her family. She wants the three of them to stay in each other’s lives forever in the way that _family_ promises and _friend_ doesn’t. She wants them to think of her when they make plans, to check in with her sometimes to make sure she’s safe, to tell her when she’s being an idiot, and she wants to do the same for them, forever. 

It’s too much to even dream of asking and Adora knows it. This is why she couldn’t go to Bright Moon, why she’d insisted on switching from foster care to independent living, why she looks away every time Catra looks too long at her. When she lets herself want things, she always wants too much. 

She calms herself down, eventually. She can get used to being alone. She’s done it before. 

* * *

Adora grits her teeth while she texts Bow at 6:05 the next morning. He replies a minute later with a funny bitmoji about oversleeping, but Adora can’t find it within herself to laugh. 

It’s raining and darker than usual when Adora gets outside, but she can’t stand the thought of being cooped up in the apartment all day without her morning run, so she leaves her phone behind and goes out anyway. 

That turns out to be a mistake. She turns around after half a mile, when the rain turns into a downpour and she’s pretty sure she can hear thunder. She can barely see through the water running down her face when she gets to the front door and swipes one hand across her face to clear it off while attempting to unlock the door with the other. 

Before she even opens the door far enough to step inside, a gray streak comes rushing past her, heading for the street.

“Melog!” she yells, as if any cat has ever come when their second-favorite roommate called them the name they got barely a week ago. She leaves her key in the lock and bolts after him, squinting to try to keep track of him through the rain and the cloud cover. He runs into the street and Adora bounds after him, keeping her eyes fixed on him. 

Right when she’s about to cross from her building's front yard to the road, something hits her from the side. She hits the ground and tumbles, and when she blinks the water out of her eyes, Catra is on top of her. At some point after Catra had grabbed her, a car had rushed by, spraying them both liberally with murky water from a puddle. 

“What the hell was that?” Catra yells. She kind of has to yell with how hard the rain is pounding on them. 

“Melog got out,” Adora says. 

“I know!” 

“I saw him running across the street.” 

“I did too! What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t want to lose him.” That really was all she had been thinking, but she’s suddenly numb at the thought of the car that had rushed by, that she hadn’t even looked for. 

“He’ll be fine! Cats hate water, he’s probably hiding under the first porch he found.” Catra’s grip on Adora’s upper arms tightens and Adora becomes aware of just how close they are, how much of their bodies are pressed together through Adora’s soaked running clothes and Catra’s soaked pajamas. “I don’t want to lose _you_ ,” she says, her voice breaking on it. Somewhere inside Adora, something cracks. “I can’t lose you. Not again.” 

“Catra, it’s okay. I’m okay,” Adora says, even as she feels increasingly like she’s in freefall. Something about this - Catra’s words, or her tone, or the way she’s holding onto Adora - is new, and Adora doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with it. 

“It’s not okay!” Catra yells through the sound of rain. “You don’t get it. I can’t lose you! _I love you!_ ” 

It’s like Catra has put her fist through every wall Adora has ever built, every way she’s convinced herself that she doesn’t need anyone and no one needs her. Catra cares about Adora, wants Adora near her, doesn’t want anything from her except for her to be who she is, because she loves her. 

A part of Adora has believed, ever since Shadow Weaver, that the closer people get to her, the more likely they are to run away. She’s never let anyone quite close enough to break through the belief that someone loving her, all of her, is impossible. 

But Catra has always been there. She’s seen everything Adora’s become and everything she used to be, and she hasn’t run, hasn’t even tried. Instead she’s here, her face inches from Adora’s, and Adora knows Catra down to the core of her, too. She would only say something like that if she meant it. 

And with the way Catra is staring at her, breathing hard and holding on to Adora like she doesn’t ever intend to let go, Adora thinks she knows _exactly_ what she means. 

“I love you too,” Adora says. It doesn’t come out in much more than a whisper, but Catra clearly hears her, because her eyes go wide and her lips part, just a little, and - 

“Melog,” Adora says, jerking her eyes away from Catra’s before her mind goes completely numb from the way Catra is looking at her. Catra swears and her grip on Adora’s arms shifts, and they pull each other up to stand. 

Catra doesn’t let go of Adora’s hand until they hear a meow from the third porch they look under, and then she has to let go to coax Melog close enough for her to grab him. The rain is starting to let up by the time they bring Melog back across the street and collectively trek about half the mud in the neighborhood into the house. 

Catra sets off to find a towel for Melog while Adora closes the door and locks it for good measure. Outside, the rain starts to come down harder, and Adora is more thankful than ever for the apartment itself, its walls and its ceiling and the ways that it’s hers. 

“Hey, Adora,” Catra says from behind her.

She almost - almost - wants to stay where she is, facing the door, where she can’t reach for something she doesn’t know if she would be able to stand to lose after she gets it. Where eventually she might be able to forget the look on Catra’s face when Adora had told her that she loved her. Where maybe she can learn to stop wanting impossible things. 

She turns around.

Catra looks almost shy as she steps closer, and Adora feels the ground break open beneath her when she realizes that a part of Catra is scared of this, too. 

Adora reaches out and takes her hand, tugs her one more step closer. Catra reaches up and cups Adora’s jaw with her free hand, which is cool from the rain and makes Adora’s skin feel like it’s on fire. There’s a moment where both of them just stand there, their clothes still dripping water onto the floor, staring at each other. Waiting. 

Adora leans forward and kisses Catra. Catra kisses her back. 

Maybe being loved will always be this terrifying. And maybe it will also help her be brave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cat endangerment: melog is scared because of a rainstorm, gets out of the apartment, and runs across the street. he is perfectly fine and quickly returned home. 
> 
> next: best friends squad formation!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> getting towards the end with the final flashback chapter! very different from the previous ones

Adora’s heart was in her throat as she clicked on the Facebook message from her college roommate-to-be. She’d seen her rooming assignment earlier in the day, but hadn’t had time to do more than send her a Facebook friend request between school and work, and she wasn’t sure what she would have said anyway. 

>> _Hi! It’s Glimmer, it looks like we’re going to be roommates next year! Looking forward to meeting you_

She seemed nice enough. Adora replied. 

>> _Thanks for messaging me, I’m looking forward to meeting you, too! Are you coming from out of town?_

Glimmer turned out to be easy to talk to - Adora spent the evening messaging back and forth with her about what they were majoring in (Business Administration for Glimmer, Natural Sciences for Adora), what their class schedules would be, and what living in the city was like. 

Adora was about to go to bed when Glimmer sent one last message. 

>> _Also, I’m bisexual and if that’s going to be a problem I’d prefer to know now._

Adora’s shoulders sagged with relief. She would have likely not brought it up the whole year if Glimmer hadn’t said it first. 

>> _Kind of the opposite, actually! I’m gay._

_ >>Sweet!! Can’t wait to meet you! _

Adora could only hope that she would hold up to Glimmer’s expectations. 

* * *

When Adora dragged her suitcase into her new dorm room after her second trip from her apartment to campus, Glimmer was there. 

“Hi,” Adora said from the open doorway. There was a pink-haired girl who Adora recognized as Glimmer from her Facebook photos, and a tall woman arranging sheets on her bed who looked up when Adora spoke. “I’m Adora.” 

“Hi!” said Glimmer. “I’m Glimmer. This is my mom.” 

“Angella. It’s a pleasure,” Glimmer’s mom said. Adora rushed forward to shake her hand. 

“It’s nice to meet you both,” she said. She hefted her suitcase up onto her bed and unzipped it, stuffing this round of clothes and notebooks and athletic gear into drawers to organize later. She had at least one more round of stuff left at her old apartment. 

“Let’s stop at the laundry room before we go back to the car, Glimmer,” Angella said. “I want to show you how to use the machines.” 

“ _Mom,_ I know how to do laundry,” Glimmer said. 

Adora tensed, sensing the beginning of an argument. She kept unpacking, as quietly as she could. 

“You know how to use our washing machine, but the ones I saw downstairs are a different brand, and you’ve never used a coin-operated one before,” Angella said. 

“I am an _adult_. I’ll figure it out,” Glimmer said. 

“Glimmer, it will take two minutes.” 

“I said I’ll figure it out! You really don’t even trust me to do my own laundry?” 

“ _Glimmer._ Please.” 

Adora dumped the rest of the contents of her suitcase on her bed and left, heart pounding. 

When she came back, Angella was gone and Glimmer was lying on her bed, typing something into her phone. She put her phone down and rolled to face Adora as she walked in. “Hi, again. Sorry about my mom.” 

“Is everything...okay?” Adora asked.

“Yeah. She just doesn’t want to let me out of her sight, and she’s going to have to get over it,” Glimmer said, rolling her eyes. “She’s at some information session for parents now, and then we’re going out to dinner with my friend Bow and his parents. My mom wanted to know if you and your family want to join us.” 

“Um.” Adora had managed to avoid mentioning to Glimmer that she didn’t exactly have a family. “No, uh, we’re good.” 

Glimmer shrugged one shoulder. “Kay.” She looked at Adora for a moment, too perceptive, and then turned her attention back to her phone. Adora went back to unpacking. 

She met Bow later that night, after dinner at the dining hall with the RA and some other students from her floor. He was sitting at Glimmer’s desk chair when she got back, and he grinned as soon as he saw her. “Adora, right?” 

“Yeah. Bow?” 

“The one and only.” 

Walking into the room made the contrast between Glimmer’s side and Adora’s painfully sharp. Glimmer had put up a few art posters on the wall above her bed, and the corkboard attached to her desk was covered with a photo collage. At the foot of her bed where there was some empty space on either side of the room she had a purple plush chair that looked way more comfortable than any of the provided dorm furniture. It looked like - like a person lived there, whereas Adora’s side had sheets on the bed, sports equipment stuffed underneath, clothes in the drawers, and not much else. She thought about Angella helping to set it up, Bow sitting there now, looking as comfortable here as most people would in their own space, and wanted - something. 

“You’re from nearby, right?” Bow asked as Adora tentatively turned her desk chair toward the two of them and sat down. 

“Yeah, I moved from the west side.” 

“Moved?” Bow asked. “Like, you won’t be going back on breaks?” 

“Uh, I can go back if there’s an emergency,” Adora said. Not to the same apartment, but she could apply for housing there again until she was twenty-one. “But I’m not planning to.” 

“Do you not get along with your family?” Glimmer asked. 

Adora looked down at her hands. “I lived by myself.” 

When she looked up, Bow and Glimmer were exchanging a loaded glance. “That sounds...peaceful,” Bow said after a few seconds of silence. 

“Where are you from?” Adora asked, hoping to get the attention off of herself. 

Bow sent her a quick smile and launched into a description of his hometown, which spiraled into a description of the summer camp where he and Glimmer had met when they were eleven, which spiraled into both of them telling Adora embarrassing stories about the other, all three of them laughing through it. Later that evening their neighbors from the next room over knocked on the door to introduce themselves, and Adora and Glimmer kept chatting with Perfuma and Mermista even after Bow left to walk back to his own building. Adora and Glimmer turned the lights off around one in the morning, and Adora fell asleep thinking that maybe this was better than _peaceful_. 

* * *

Adora made a habit of avoiding the dorm on Sunday afternoons, which was when Glimmer usually called Angella, but when she was getting back from a night class after a full day at her new job in the student union, she could hear the frustrated tone of voice that Glimmer only ever used with her mom. 

She winced and swiped her ID card to get inside. She had an essay due tomorrow, and her notes were in a folder on her desk. She just had to grab those and then she could retreat to the common room at the end of the hall. 

“It’s just one night!” Glimmer was saying into her phone, lying on her bed. “Perfuma knows what she’s doing and it’s going to be fine!” 

Adora grabbed her folder and opened it to make sure it had everything she needed while Angella said something Adora couldn’t hear. 

“It’s like you don’t want me to grow up at all!” Glimmer said, then Adora heard her phone bounce off the thin carpet. She turned around. 

“Ughhhhh,” Glimmer said, making eye contact with Adora and then burying her face in a pillow. “My mom doesn’t want me to go on Perfuma’s camping trip, which is especially ridiculous because I am an adult, I am in college, and she can’t actually tell me what to do anymore.”

“Yeah,” Adora said, clueless as to how to respond to that. 

“She wants me to live in a little bubble and never do anything fun at all,” Glimmer continued. 

“Why did you tell her you wanted to go, if you knew she would try to stop you?”

“She’s my mom,” Glimmer said, shrugging. “If something does go wrong I don’t want her to find out _after_.” 

“Right. Of course.” Adora tried to think of something useful to say. “Maybe she’ll come around.” 

“Ugh. I hope so.” 

The next morning, Adora met Bow at the gym, which was becoming something of a tradition. Adora’s class and work schedule meant that the best time for her to go was in the mornings, and Bow seemed to be naturally a morning person. “I have a question,” she said after they’d warmed up and drifted over to the weight machines. 

Bow paused and looked at her. “What’s up?”

“Whenever Glimmer and Angella argue - which feels like every time they talk - I never know what to tell Glimmer after,” she said, keeping her eyes on the weight rack. “She talks about it with you, too, right?” 

Bow chuckled, and Adora risked a glance at him. He was smiling, obviously not mad at her, which was better than Adora had really expected. “Yeah. Angella loves Glimmer, but she doesn’t always have a good sense of when to be supportive and when to be firm. And Glimmer is stubborn _and_ reckless, so a lot of the time I think Angella’s right to worry about her.” He glanced up at Adora and she nodded him along. “As for what to say - sometimes what Glimmer needs to do is go back to Angella with a more reasonable version of whatever she asked for, and sometimes there’s nothing to fix and she just needs to vent. Does that help?” 

“I guess.” It answered her question, but Adora still felt lost. 

“Maybe...think about what you’d want us to say, if you were talking to us about something we didn’t really understand,” he said, careful and gentle. 

Adora hadn’t ever considered telling Bow and Glimmer any more about her life than what they asked about directly, much less thought about how she would want them to respond. She shoved the thought aside and nodded at Bow. “Sure.”

“It’s complicated, with those two,” Bow said. “They bicker because they’re both strong-willed and that’s the best way for them to communicate. It probably means a lot to Glimmer that you’re willing to hear her out. I wouldn’t worry about saying the right thing.” 

“Thanks,” Adora said, not much less lost than before. It sounded like an exhausting sort of relationship to have, but it wasn’t like Adora had room to judge. 

* * *

“Instead of telling my dads I’m changing my major, I could fake my death,” Bow mused. He was lying on the floor next to Glimmer’s bed, the paperwork for switching his major from history to engineering spread out on the floor in front of him, head buried in his arms. Adora was trying to read a book for her lit class at her desk, and Glimmer was curled up on her chair, typing on her laptop. 

“It would be tricky for you to study engineering if you fake your death,” Adora said. 

“Ughhhhhhh.”

“Why is it such a big deal?” she asked. 

“Lance has spent my whole life telling me that people don’t care enough about history and that the best way to improve the world is by understanding what’s already happened. George doesn’t care as much what I study as long as I don’t end up spending my life making money for some heartless corporation, which is technically what most engineers do. Ugh. I shouldn’t.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Glimmer asked. Her voice was patient and measured, as if they’d already had this conversation. 

Bow buried his head even further in his arms. “They’d disown me.”

“What’s the worst that could _actually_ happen?”

“They’d be disappointed.”

“And they would get over it. Bow, just tell them.” 

“Ugh.” He picked up the phone. “What do I say?” 

_That it’s none of their business what you study in college_ , is all Adora’s mind came up with. She knew it wouldn’t be helpful, and Glimmer appeared to be thinking about it. The silence stretched. 

“What if we roleplay it?” Glimmer suggested. “You be you, and Adora and I will be Lance and George.”

“Okay,” said Bow. He rolled over to stare at the ceiling. “Dads, I’ve thought about it very thoroughly, and I’ve decided to change my major to engineering. I love you very much and understand that you want the best for me, but I don’t have the passion for history that you do. You’ve taught me to know myself and follow my dreams, and I think that becoming an engineer is the best way for me to be as happy and fulfilled as you one day.”

“Bow, that was beautiful,” Glimmer said, then her voice went deeper as she apparently remembered the roleplaying schtick. “Bow, we’ve always wanted nothing more than for you to be happy. If you think this is the decision that gets you there, of course we’ll support you.” 

She and Bow both turned to Adora. “Um.” She tried to mimic Glimmer’s deep voice. “I’m disappointed, but I’ll get over it.”

“Adora!” Glimmer said chastisingly. 

She relaxed when Bow started laughing. “Okay. Fine. I’ll call.”

Adora tried to go back to her book as Bow made the call. She didn’t get it. Bow caring about what his parents thought seemed like so much work and she didn’t see the point. 

* * *

“Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?” Glimmer asked when Adora got back to their room after class one day in mid-November. 

“Um.” There was no good reason to lie. “No.” 

“You should come with me to Bright Moon,” Glimmer said. “My mom would love to see you again, there’s plenty of space, and my grandparents and aunt always visit so it won’t just be the three of us.” 

“Okay,” Adora found herself saying. Glimmer and Angella together were stressful to be around, but refusing Glimmer’s invitation would be rude, and a week of eating in the dining hall by herself didn’t sound as appealing as it once would have. 

A week later, Adora climbed into the back of Angella’s car, her backpack stuffed with clothes and books. “I’m so glad you’re joining us, Adora,” she said as Glimmer tosses her suitcase into the trunk. 

“Thanks so much for having me,” Adora said. 

Glimmer came around to the passenger seat and let herself in. “Ready.”

“Do you have everything you need for your schoolwork?” Angella asked as Glimmer buckled her seatbelt. 

“Yes, mom,” Glimmer said, her voice already exasperated. 

“And your -”

“Mom! I know how to pack for a five-day trip!” 

Adora glances between them, trying to see the love Bow had told her was there. From what Adora could tell, Angella made Glimmer anxious and frustrated, and the reverse seemed to be equally true. 

Thankfully, the arguing lapsed as they left the city on the highway and Angella started asking Adora about her classes. It was dark by the time Angella pulled into the driveway of a big house with a yard so big the next houses were just distant lights. 

Adora followed Glimmer and Angella inside. “We can put our stuff upstairs, then I’ll show you around,” Glimmer said, waving Adora forward. Adora followed her up a shiny wooden staircase into a spacious room with high ceilings and windows on two walls. It looked exactly Adora would have expected - mounds of pillows, gauzy curtains, and shelves full of pretty trinkets and souvenirs from vacations. There was a second mattress set up on the floor, complete with sheets and pillows. 

There was also a photo of a man Adora recognized from some of the photos Glimmer had strung up over her desk at school, but this one was bigger and framed. He had features that Adora recognized in Glimmer, especially his dimpled smile as he grinned downward at the camera. A corner of the photo was obscured by a dark blob that Adora recognized as a thumb. 

“I took that,” Glimmer said, walking up beside Adora. “I was four, I think. It’s the only picture I have of him looking at me.” 

“He looks like he loved you a lot,” Adora said. That much was clear from the photo. 

“He did,” said Angella from the doorway. Adora tensed, bracing herself for this to turn into another spat between her and Glimmer, but when Angella walked up to Glimmer and dropped a kiss on her forehead, Glimmer just shuffled closer to lean against her. “More than anything in the world. Glimmer gets her stubbornness from him, and her bravery.” 

“And my height,” Glimmer said. “If you couldn’t tell.” She was still leaning against Angella, who had wrapped an arm around her. 

“I came up here to ask what kind of pizza you prefer,” Angella said. “Micah’s mother and sister are getting in tomorrow, and they’re the cooks of the family. We...supervise the Thanksgiving dinner preparation.” 

“And make trips to the grocery store,” Glimmer said. 

“Yes, it’s not the day before Thanksgiving without at least two trips to the grocery store.” 

“That sounds nice,” Adora said. Her mind was stuck on Angella and Glimmer the way they were now, touching comfortably, finishing each other’s sentences. Their conversation had the same rhythm as their near-constant fighting, and Adora felt like she finally understood why Glimmer called her mother every Sunday, even if all they did was fight. Because there was this, too, always, in all of it. Angella criticized Glimmer’s decisions because she wanted to keep her safe, and Glimmer pushed back because she wanted her mother to understand and respect her. All of it was because they loved each other. 

“It’s not nice,” Glimmer said, rolling her eyes. “The parking lot is always practically full and you can hardly move in the store.” 

“It’s tradition. It’s nice,” Angella said. 

“Okay, it’s kind of nice.”

* * *

Bow’s birthday fell at the end of the January break, and he invited Adora and Glimmer to spend the last weekend of break at his parents’ house. He lived a few counties over from Glimmer, and picked them up from Bright Moon in a sleek red car.

“I’ll just warn you in advance, my dads are a little much,” Bow said as he backed the car out of Glimmer’s driveway. “They’re going to love you, but they’re going to express it by enthusiastically asking you a lot of questions and then try to bond by telling you embarrassing stories about me.” 

“I think I can handle that, Adora said. 

Bow’s expression was skeptical, but he shrugged and changed the subject. 

Adora was not prepared for Lance and George. Lance was effusive and welcoming, and George reeled back his most intense moments of enthusiasm but more often matched it. “We’ve been so excited to meet you, Adora. I said, anyone who’s become such a dear friend to Bow must be worth knowing.” 

“Uh, I don’t know about -”

“Have a seat, have a seat! I’ll get snacks.”

Bow and Glimmer seemed perfectly happy to sit back and grin as Adora was interrogated about her choice of major, her job, her plans for the summer, her hobbies, and her thoughts on the university's gen ed requirements. Adora surprised herself by not being bothered by the attention - mostly because George and Lance seemed to listen, really listen, when she spoke and asked follow-up questions on topics she actually had more to say about. They had their own opinions, which made Bow roll his eyes a few times, but all they really seemed to want to do was get to know Adora. 

By the time some of Bow’s siblings got home, throwing the house into chaos, she could understand why Bow put so much thought and effort into making Lance and George proud. Kind of like Bow, they cared deeply about the things they said they cared about. It was easy to see why Bow wanted them in his life, even though they sometimes made things harder - because it was worth it. 

* * *

“We have something we want to talk to you about,” Bow said, looking at Adora as the three of them set their plates down at a table in the dining hall. 

Adora took her seat, tensing up at the seriousness in his voice. “What is it?”

Glimmer spoke first. “Since before we actually started school here, we’ve been planning to get an apartment together for our second year. It’s cheaper to live in the city than in the dorms, and we’d have our own kitchen and not have to share rooms.” 

“Oh,” Adora said, looking down at her plate. It made sense that Glimmer and Bow would want to move on. “Yeah, that makes sense.” 

“We were wondering if you wanted to join us,” Bow said. 

Adora looked up and looked between them, trying to gauge if she’d heard correctly. “Really?”

“Of course! Adora, you’re like the best roommate who’s ever existed.” 

“And a really good friend,” Bow added. 

She looked between the two of them and then ducked to hide a smile that was probably way too revealing. “If that’s what you want, then, yeah, I’d love that.” 

“Did you think we were going to just abandon you?” Glimmer’s expression was disbelieving, but Bow’s was thoughtful. 

“I -” She couldn’t say _of course I did_. She scrambled to think of an alternative. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for thinking of me.” 

Bow’s expression was still strange, but Glimmer shrugged it off. “We’re sort of hoping to stay close to the school, but there’s a few places a little further away that would let both of us bring cars, which we’ll probably need if we both get internships,” she said. She pulled out her phone. “We can arrange for a showing at this one on Saturday -”

* * *

The day after finals ended, Angella drove down to help Glimmer and Adora move into their new apartment. It was a building intended for students, mostly, so it had come with basic furniture like the dorms, and it had felt huge compared to the dorm rooms when they’d toured it. 

Angella frowned when Glimmer unlocked the door and led her inside. “It’s a bit small, isn’t it?” 

“Mom, we’re college students. We’re not supposed to living like royalty.” 

Adora brought her suitcase over to the room that she’d picked for its two windows after Bow and Glimmer had both insisted that they didn’t care which they got. She opened the suitcase and started shoving stuff in drawers, hoping to drown out Glimmer and Angella’s argument. She knew that she was the limit on the price range they’d been looking at, and the reason they’d been looking at furnished places when Bow and Glimmer had all their own furniture at home. They had insisted that it was okay, but she didn’t like the idea of them making decisions based on her needs. 

She wanted to keep Glimmer and Bow near her for as long as she could. She knew what that could look like, from the way she’d seen them with their families, but she was terrified to be that difficult. 

She didn’t know how to be worth it. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the final chapter! thanks so much for following this story.
> 
> content warning for alcohol use - no drunkenness, but alcohol is mentioned throughout the chapter

When Melog’s dried off and Adora and Catra have showered, they make coffee and tea and sit on the couch, listening to the rain on the windows. “So,” Catra says, eyes flicking toward Adora and then back at her coffee. “How long have _you_ wanted to do that?” 

Adora doesn’t even have to think about it. “The morning after you got here, I walked in and you were in the kitchen with your hair all sticking up, staring at the coffee makers,” she says. She tries to imagine what would have happened if she had kissed Catra that morning and can’t. It’s as if that morning happened in another lifetime. The past few weeks have been so quiet, in the scheme of things, but so much has changed. 

Catra smiles. 

“What about you?” Adora asks, scarcely believing that she can. 

“Longer than that,” she says, eyes intent on Adora’s reaction. “There wasn’t any specific moment. When I knocked on that door and you opened it, it was already there. It took me a bit to figure out if it was still real.” 

Seven years. A part of Catra had loved Adora for seven years. She’d loved Catra too, for as long as she’d known her, but after she’d left that love had been ensnared in a web of responsibility and regret and it had hurt to think about, and besides, Adora hadn’t started to want to kiss anyone for another few years after they’d last seen each other. 

She tries to let the regret go. She doesn’t know what would have happened if she’d done anything differently, and they’re here now. She leans in to kiss Catra again, just because she can. 

Catra shifts away when Melog, still slightly damp, jumps up onto her lap. “Did you text Bow about Melog’s escape?” she asks. Usually Adora sends him anything that could even resemble a Melog update. 

Adora looks down at her tea. “No.” 

“What’s wrong?” 

“What makes you so sure something’s wrong?” 

“Um, I’ve met you.” Catra pokes at Adora’s cheek. “Your face says something’s wrong.” 

“It’s silly.” 

“So?” 

“Bow and Glimmer -” _don’t want me. Don’t need me_. She knows that’s an overreaction to not being included in a single video chat, but it’s tempting to believe. Tempting to try to push them away before they get too close.

“What about them?” 

“I’m just...figuring stuff out, okay. I just need to get it through my head that they’re not going to abandon me. I said it was silly.” 

“That doesn’t sound silly. You trying to convince yourself of that without bothering to _ask_ them is silly.” 

“I can’t just -”

“Call Bow. I’ve barely ever heard him say anything other than babytalking at Melog through your phone, but I can already tell that he cares about you. Call him.” 

“ _I can’t._ It isn’t important enough to burden them with.” 

“You think asking them to remind you that they care about you is a _burden_?” 

Adora stares, knowing that the answer she believes is the wrong one. After a moment, Catra throws her head back and laughs. “Take it from someone who’s been a burden on pretty much everyone I’ve ever met,” she says. “It isn’t.”

“Catra -” 

“What, _you_ doubt it? Do you remember how many times you had to make excuses for me when I tried to ditch school? How many fights I started that you had to break up? How many times you did chores for me that I didn’t bother with because Shadow Weaver was on the verge of exploding anyway? I’m not putting myself down when I say that. It’s just the truth.” Her mouth twists into a frown. “I didn’t figure it out until I almost lost Scorpia. She put up with so much of my shit, and I barely noticed. I got used to it. She didn’t. It got rough. But after that, we talked a lot about what was and wasn’t okay, and we stayed friends, and we trust each other a lot more now.” She smiles. “Even if you asking for ten seconds of their time to tell you that they care about you was a burden, which it’s not, being a burden isn’t the worst thing in the world.” 

Instinctively, Adora wants to refute her. She wants to argue that she’s done perfectly fine by prioritizing not being a burden on her friends above pretty much everything else. 

Shadow Weaver had taught her that being ignored was as good as it gets. With Bow and Glimmer, the opposite is true, and Adora can’t help but want them near her, want them to stay. It’s terrifying to know that she could lose what she has, and a part of her wants to shy away from them and forget what it feels like to have their friendship.

But at the same time she knows Catra’s right. Catra, who’s said and shown over and over again that she loves Adora back. 

Maybe, _maybe_ , Glimmer and Bow also think that she’s worth it. 

Adora Facetimes Bow. Catra scooches closer to her and holds Melog up so that he’s in the camera view. When Bow, who has his glasses on which means Adora has probably interrupted him doing schoolwork, sees them, he grins. 

“Hi,” Adora says. She doesn’t quite know how to continue.

“Adora would like to be reassured that you care about her,” Catra says. Adora’s tempted to turn her camera off - she can see herself blushing red in the corner of the screen. 

“What?” Bow says, which is fair, because based on historical precedent he’d probably expected a cute cat story. He takes his glasses off and blinks a few times. “Adora, you are literally the reason I wake up in the morning. You’re the only person besides me who I’ve ever let drive my car. You’re loyal and kind and I trust you more than pretty much anyone else in the world. If I cared about you any more I would probably explode.” 

Catra’s reaches out a hand - the one that isn’t petting Melog - and takes the phone from Adora. Adora lets her, hands shaking, squeezing her eyes shut to try to keep tears from spilling out. 

“Adora, you and Glimmer are my best friends, and when I use those words, I’m not talking about something temporary. I want us to be best friends when we’re too old to think. I love you so much, and I’m sorry if I did anything that made you doubt that.” 

Adora loses the battle against tears, shakes her head so that she can dislodge the lump in her throat for long enough to talk. “Love you too,” she says. 

On the phone, she sees Bow smile. “Catra, you’re going to have to hug her for me.” 

Catra moves Melog into Adora’s lap and hugs her, as requested. It feels a little easier to breathe, after. 

“Did something happen?” Bow asks, when Adora’s recovered a little. 

“No,” Adora says. After what Bow just said, one video chat session without Adora couldn’t matter less. “Everything’s okay.” 

Bow smiles. “I’ve got Zoom class in a few minutes, but I can pretend I’m having internet problems if you need to talk more.”

“No, go to class,” Adora says. “Thank you.”

“In that case, I’ll talk to you soo - uh, sometime! Bye!” He ends the call abruptly, with a slight look of panic. 

Adora frowns. “What was that?” 

“Nothing!” Catra says in what sounds like her lying voice. “Don’t worry about it. Do you want to call Glimmer, too?” 

Adora shakes her head. “Knowing Bow, she’ll probably call me in a few minutes.” Melog is still in Adora’s lap, and Adora lets herself rest her head against Catra’s shoulder. Catra’s arm snakes around Adora’s waist and Adora jerks in surprise when her phone vibrates with another video call a few minutes later. 

She doesn’t bother to shake Catra off. “Hey, Glimmer.” 

“Hey.” Glimmer has obviously noticed Catra’s arm around Adora, but she doesn’t comment on it. “You’re a wonderful best friend and I love you very much. Are you okay?”

Adora smiles. “Yeah, I am.” 

Glimmer looks away and then back at the camera. “I don’t want to make any assumptions, but - is this about my Instagram post?”

“It isn’t...not,” Adora says. 

“I’m sorry about that. It’s not like we’ve been having secret meetings without you - I called him because I had a fight with my mom, and we talked about that, and then he wanted to show me the latest version of -” Catra clears her throat, loudly. “You know, uh, nothing, and it was nice but I miss you too.”

“I miss you,” Adora says. It’s a relief to be able to admit it, especially since she knows it’s reciprocated. 

Glimmer smiles. “No matter what happens with school, I’m coming back in August. My mom and I are going to drive each other bananas otherwise. Also, I learned a new recipe, so if Bow doesn’t come back we’ll have four to rotate through.” 

“Catra knows at least one recipe,” Adora says, finding Catra’s hand and squeezing it. Glimmer had only subletted her the room through July, but Adora isn’t just going to let her go. Adora’s room isn’t exactly huge, but if Catra wants, they can manage. 

Glimmer grins. “Then we’re set.” 

Adora smiles back. “Yeah. We’re set.” 

* * *

When Adora was little, her birthday was an occasion for cake and pizza, but never anything of much significance to her. When she’d lived with Shadow Weaver, birthdays weren’t a thing. She’s sure Shadow Weaver had known when her birthday was, but she never gave any indication of it. Her class had sung Happy Birthday to her when she’d been in fifth grade and her track and field team had done the same in middle school, and she’d convinced herself that that was enough. 

After that, it varied. She spent her fourteenth birthday in a house with eleven or so other kids, and those parents had been too busy to remember it. The next year she’d had a track meet and her coach bought the whole team cupcakes to celebrate. On her sixteenth birthday, she’d been in another overcrowded house and told the parents she was going out with friends, but she’d actually gone to the public library to work on her independent housing application and scroll through various organizations’ websites, trying to figure out how to find someone who could teach her how to drive. Her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays she’d spent at school then work then alone in her apartment, like it was any other day. 

When Bow and Glimmer had found out that it was her birthday from social media their freshman year, they’d been scandalized to find out that she’d never had a birthday party, and two hours later their whole floor was crammed into Adora and Glimmer’s dorm room, singing Happy Birthday to Adora over a cake Glimmer had found at the grocery store. The party had ended up lasting hours, and it had been not only the best birthday, but one of the best days of Adora’s life. 

The next year, Bow and Glimmer had told her not to plan anything and surprised her with an Escape Room outing with some of their other friends. That they’d gone to all the effort to plan it for her, and that it was something so perfectly suited to her, and the fact that they’d won, had made _that_ the new best birthday of her life. 

So, maybe she’d kind of hoped that this year would be the same, but nobody could have predicted what this semester would hold. When she wakes up on the morning of her birthday, she’s already over it. 

It’s a Saturday, so Adora’s surprised to wake up alone. Her 8 AM classes don’t exactly jive with Catra’s evening work schedule, so they’ve mostly been staying in their separate rooms, but Catra’s snuck into Adora’s bed after her last few Friday shifts. Adora respects the concept of the weekend enough, even now when there’s nothing to do, to not set an alarm for Saturdays. It’s already almost eight, but she stays in bed to respond to the messages that friends and acquaintances are putting on her Facebook wall, and then goes out to face another boring day. 

“You’re up! Happy birthday!” Catra says, bouncing up from the couch and grabbing a bottle of champagne from the floor in front of her, which she shoves into Adora’s hands before leaning forward to kiss her. 

Adora can’t help but smile as warmth floods her. Catra hadn’t forgotten - she wouldn’t have. “It’s eight in the morning,” she says, staring down at the bottle of champagne. 

“Yeah. That’s why you put orange juice in mimosas,” Catra says. “Come on.” She drags Adora to the kitchen, where Adora opens the bottle of champagne over the tile floor. She giggles at the sound of the cork popping off - she’s seen bottles of champagne opened, but hadn’t actually done it herself before. 

“What’s that for?” she asks, mostly to Catra’s phone, which for some reason Catra is pointing at her. 

“I wouldn’t have dared to keep your expression when you opened that bottle to myself,” Catra says, showing Adora the video she’s just taken. 

Adora rolls her eyes, still smiling at the whole situation. Catra pours them both mimosas in Glimmer’s cheap wine glasses and holds hers out for a toast. “Happy birthday,” she says. Adora clinks her glass against hers, daring to believe that this birthday might be pretty great after all. 

Catra also has muffins from the one bakery in the neighborhood that’s open for contactless pickup, and they eat them standing in the kitchen with the window open, letting the warm spring breeze waft in. It’s shaping up to be the nicest day of spring so far, and Adora is idly thinking of going for a walk in the park when Catra pops the last bit of muffin into her mouth, chases it with the last of her mimosa, and turns to Adora to say “Get dressed.”

“It’s my birthday. Don’t I get to decide if I have to get dressed?” 

“Technically, I guess. But you’re going to want to get dressed.” With that, Catra reaches into her back pocket and hands her an envelope. 

It’s labeled _Adora_ , in what’s obviously Bow’s handwriting. Adora smiles so hard she feels like her face might never recover. She slides her finger under the seal and opens it, then unfolds the paper inside.

All it has on it are two long numbers, again obviously in Bow’s handwriting. It takes Adora a moment to recognize them as coordinates, and then she laughs. Catra is looking at the paper over her shoulder, obviously confused. “Okay, I’ll get dressed. Then I’ll need to grab my computer. Or maybe a map.” 

Not long later, Catra is locking the door behind them while Adora spins in place to find the direction toward the coordinates she’s loaded into her Maps app. She caught a glimpse of the area she’s headed toward and she’s pretty sure she knows where she’s going, but just looking up the address would be no fun at all. 

Catra grabs onto Adora’s hand at one point when she’s staring so intently at her phone she almost walks out into traffic, and after that she doesn’t let go, even when they get onto campus and are walking on footpaths instead of sidewalks. 

The coordinates lead to the front door of the dorm Adora and Glimmer had lived in during their freshman year, where Bow had also spent more time than at his own dorm. Adora looks around for a box - she and Bow had gotten really into geocaching last summer, and she suspects that this scavenger hunt is Bow’s attempt to replicate it without using the public app. 

She finds it as soon as she thinks to look in the bushes under their old window, where Glimmer had made a habit of dropping her ID card so that Bow could let himself in without Glimmer or Adora having to go all the way downstairs. She grabs it triumphantly and then turns to Catra. “Did you hide this?” 

Catra bites her lip. “Don’t get mad. Bow drove in and set everything up last night. He told me all the details of how safe it is - he never touched any of it without gloves, and everything was in the trunk of his dad’s car while he was driving.”

Adora just grins down at the package. Back in March, when nobody seemed to be sure how much of a threat the virus was, Bow had been the one to take the recommended safety measures most seriously, and he’d hounded Adora and Glimmer for weeks after he’d left for George and Lance’s, making sure that they were staying in before the stay home order kicked in and that they had masks to wear to the grocery store. That he would break the rules by driving this far - even if he hadn’t come near anyone - was practically unbelievable, but he had. For Adora. 

“What are you waiting for?” Catra asks. It’s a great question. Adora sits down on the sidewalk and opens the box, which is plain cardboard held down with duct tape. 

At least, the outer box is. The inner one is wrapped in sparkly pink paper, which Adora grins before tearing into. It’s a collection of things that Glimmer had obviously bought online and shipped to Bow, probably like the wrapping paper. There’s fancy-looking push pins, a roll of thin twine, tiny clothespins, and a package that turns out to contain at least a dozen photos, mostly from this dorm. There’s Adora and Bow on Adora’s nineteenth birthday, standing on her bed and attempting to sing karaoke with Glimmer doubled over laughing next to them. There’s a selfie that Glimmer took of her and Adora at the library, dead-eyed but smiling in the middle of finals week, the photo that had been taken after their group had won the Escape Room, other moments she remembers and treasures, and pictures that Adora didn’t even know existed. 

Glimmer has a collage of photos of her friends and family, which she’s had on her wall ever since Adora met her and adds to every year, and now Adora has everything she needs to make her own. 

Also in the cardboard box is another envelope and another set of coordinates. Adora puts them into her phone and leads Catra on what turns out to be a very unnecessarily circuitous route to the campus library, which has a box hidden under one of the benches on the patio where Adora and Bow have tried to do their homework on days when it’s too nice to be indoors unnecessarily. She sits down on the bench to open it, and Catra sits down next to her - they’ve been walking for most of an hour, and the view from here is pretty great. There’s a grassy courtyard in front of them, overgrown with campus being closed, an empty fountain with a statue in the middle, and the mishmash of ancient and modern buildings that make up the campus visible past it. 

“ _If_ I wanted to go to college,” Catra says. Adora pauses in her attempt to pick the duct tape off the box. “Do you really think that’s realistic?” 

Adora sets the box down. She stops herself before saying _of course_ like she would have last month. Of course it’s _possible_ , but that’s not quite what Catra is asking. “I think it depends on how much you want it.”

Catra’s still staring out at the campus, lips pursed with thought. 

“You like your job, right?” Adora asks. Catra’s never said that in so many words, but despite the gruesome things she sees at the hospital, she only ever has good things to say about it, and for Catra, that’s saying something. 

Catra frowns. “I guess.” Maybe she hasn’t thought it in so many words. 

Adora knows that Catra doesn’t need to define herself by what she does, that most people don’t. Adora’s always been a good student and followed the rules, and she’s pretty sure more people have seen her as a non-problem than as a person, exactly. It’s just in this bizarre few weeks that she’s starting to understand that who she is at baseline might, in some ways, matter more. She’s barely learned to think like that, though, and her understanding that Catra will continue to be exactly who she is whether she stays at the animal hospital or gets a new job or goes to college or whatever won’t actually help Catra make a decision.

All Adora knows how to do is move along the path everyone always expected her to take. Catra hasn’t even had that option. She’s deciding what she wants, really wants, and in that way she’s lightyears ahead of Adora. 

“I know you _can_ do it,” Adora says. “The rest is up to you.” 

Catra smiles, thoughtful, then pokes Adora in the shoulder. “What are you waiting for? Open it!” 

Adora does, and her eyes start to water when she sees what’s inside. There’s a packet of Lance’s favorite tea, which Adora tried all of once when she spent a weekend at their house last year and happens to be the best tea she’s ever had, and a gift card to the restaurant George and Lance took the three of them to in January for Bow’s birthday, with a note from George that says _still open! I triple checked._

There’s an envelope at the bottom. “How many more of these are there?” Adora asks, laughing on it to hide the fact that her voice is breaking a little. 

“I don’t know. Are you crying?” Catra sounds incredulous, but when Adora looks away, trying to blink back tears, Catra folds her into a hug. “You’re ridiculous.” 

The gentle teasing combined with the warmth in Catra’s voice helps Adora take a few deep breaths against Catra’s shoulder to calm herself. “I thought we were just going to watch movies on the couch all day and that you’d make me go buy a bottle of rum when the liquor store opened,” Adora says when she can manage it. 

“Well, shit. That was my plan for the afternoon,” Catra says, and Adora actually laughs at that. She pulls away, opens the next envelope, and enters the coordinates into her phone. 

The next stop is the campus gym, which has a box with a brand-new pair of Adora’s favorite brand of running shoes. Her current ones have been falling apart since before Bow left in March, but since her on-campus job became obsolete she hasn’t had the money to replace them. The next stop is the park between campus and their current apartment, which Adora has to search through for a while before she finds a box tucked under a rock. At some point Catra gives up on following her around and lies down on the grass, but she looks over at Adora’s _“Ha!”_ when she finally finds the box. It’s heavier than the others, and Adora can’t imagine what it might be until she opens it and finds a bottle of wine wrapped in tissue paper and a note from Angella. “I hope Glimmer’s mom knows I can’t tell the difference between this and wine that costs three dollars at the grocery store,” she says to Catra, who’s made her way over to lie on the ground next to Adora. 

“You’ll just have to buy a lot of shit wine to refine your tastes before trying it,” she says. “Also, I hope you know that you’re going to keep me supplied for the next three months as my reward for letting you drag me all over the city.” 

“This is your reward for letting me drag you all over the city,” Adora says, and she puts the wine gently back in the box and then leans down to kiss Catra. Even with the nice weather, the park is relatively empty, and Adora loses at least a few minutes to kissing Catra and thinking of nothing else. 

They head back to the apartment after that, and Adora has to insist that she really is perfectly happy to make sandwiches and sit on the couch and watch a movie. Catra falls asleep halfway through and Adora barely manages to watch after that because her eyes keep straying to Catra’s face, uncommonly relaxed in sleep. She pretends not to notice when Catra wakes up - she doesn’t know how much Catra managed to sleep between getting home from work at midnight and waking up to surprise Adora in the morning. 

They don’t actually go to the liquor store, but Catra does insist that Adora order takeout margaritas with their tacos using the gift card from George. When they go to pick them up nobody even asks to see Adora’s ID, which Catra mutters about the whole way home but Adora thinks is hilarious. “Could’ve been having takeout cocktails this whole time,” Catra’s still on about as she unlocks the door. Then she looks at the clock. “Grab your laptop, it’s almost six,” she says, as if Adora’s supposed to know what she’s talking about. 

She’s happy to comply, though, and a few minutes later she and Catra are sitting close together on the couch so that Adora’s webcam catches both of them and Glimmer and Bow are smiling at her through Zoom. 

Before anyone says anything, Bow grabs a ukelele from next to him and he and Glimmer start singing the song Adora had tried to sing karaoke to on her birthday two years ago. By the first chorus, Adora’s caught her breath from laughing and joins in, bolstered by Catra’s grin from next to her. 

After that, they try really hard to sing Happy Birthday - or at least Bow tries. Glimmer and Catra both give up halfway through in favor of laughing about how terrible they sound, but Adora would rather watch them laugh at themselves then hear a perfectly in-tune rendition of Happy Birthday any day. 

“What’s it like being twenty-one?” Glimmer asks, when that’s finally over. 

“I ordered takeout margaritas and didn’t get carded,” Adora offers. Glimmer turns out to be just as offended at that as Catra was, and from there the four of them just talk, as if it’s any regular night, as if they’re all really here. Catra fits in easily, probably because Adora has the best friends in the whole world and Glimmer and Bow both keep cutting each other off to catch her up on inside jokes and ask her questions. 

“Oh, shit, I almost forgot,” Catra says when they reach a lull in the conversation. It’s obviously a lie, Adora knows her, but she doesn’t mention it as Catra presses a package into her hands. “Brace yourself. If I knew a few days ago that you cried over thoughtful birthday presents I would have gotten you a cheap refrigerator magnet or something.” 

“Oh no,” Adora mutters, which makes Catra burst out laughing. She tears off the wrapping paper - which is Glimmer’s, she must have left it here - and stares. 

She feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes. The present is an eye-catching red picture frame, and in it is the sketch Adora did on the back of an essay the week Catra moved in. Adora had completely forgotten about it, and somehow it’s so much more than she remembers. Looking at it now, she’s bowled over with the joy of nights like the one she’d drawn, and the longing that had inspired her to draw it. 

She laughs. Their fight that night had started with Catra trying to get her to show this drawing to Bow and Glimmer, and now Catra’s tricked her into it. Adora can’t find it in herself to be annoyed. 

“I drew this a few weeks ago,” she says, flipping the framed picture over and displaying it for the webcam. “And Catra apparently stole it.” 

Catra beams. “You’re welcome.” 

“Adora, that’s so good!” Glimmer gushes. 

“It’s so...beautiful.” Bow sounds like he might be crying a little, too, which Adora isn’t about to give him a hard time for. 

“Can it go in the living room? Please?” Glimmer asks. 

Adora has to laugh. “It’s on scrap paper. If you look closely you can see me misspelling fjord at least twice on the back.” 

“It’s like, extra artsy that way,” says Bow. 

“Psst. I promise I didn’t plan this,” Catra says, and she taps on the back of the picture frame. 

Adora flips it over to find, taped to the back, a gift card for a chain art supply store that has a location in their neighborhood. She grins. “I’ll make a better one. Deal?” 

“Only if you insist,” says Bow.

She thinks about sending Bow and Glimmer their own versions - and how happy it would obviously make them, despite all of Adora’s attempts to convince herself otherwise. She thinks about having thick drawing paper again, messing around with something messy like charcoal or watercolor. The gift card - maybe it would look lazy, to an outsider, but Adora feels her eyes burn harder when she sees it. It’s the opposite of how Shadow Weaver had approached Adora’s interest in art, and Catra knows it. 

She folds Catra into a hug to try to get a handle on her emotions. “I’m going to make you cry on your birthday. Just so you’re prepared,” she says as Catra hugs her back. 

“I don’t cry when people are nice to me. Mostly I yell at them,” Catra says. “Just so you’re prepared.” 

Adora laughs. “We’re so bad at this.” 

“Yeah. But we’re working on it.” 

Adora takes one last deep breath and turns back to her friends. Catra takes her hand. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you draw before,” Glimmer says. “Except for like, biology diagrams.” 

Adora feels herself tense up. Catra flicks her eyes to her. Not long ago, she would have made up an excuse - that college has kept her too busy and she went back to it out of boredom, or that she draws all the time in secret, or that she’s actually never drawn anything before and is just a natural prodigy. 

But she doesn’t want to say any of that. She wants to tell Bow and Glimmer the truth, to give them what they need to understand her better. To show them that she trusts them. 

“Our foster parent was, uh, weird about it,” she says. “I haven’t drawn much since then.” 

“She was a huge bitch,” Catra adds. “A human vampire who subsisted on sucking the joy out of everything she touched.” 

Adora is startled away from looking anxiously at Bow and Glimmer’s reactions long enough to laugh. “Did you come up with that yourself?”

Catra grins. “I spent _years_ thinking up insults for her in most of my spare time.” 

On the laptop screen, Glimmer and Bow have neutral expressions and don’t say anything, which is the way they tend to get when any conversation touches on Adora’s past. Once, Adora would have been sorry for making them uncomfortable, but she finds that she isn’t. They’re all going to have to get used to her talking about it, at least a little. 

That’s enough of the subject for tonight, though. She picks up her margarita, which is mostly melted ice by now, and raises it in a toast. “To you guys, for making this the best birthday ever.” Catra clinks her glass, and they all pretend to clink each other’s through the webcams, and Adora finishes her drink. 

“Thanks for being my family,” she says, before she can talk herself out of it.

“Adora!” Bow’s grin is huge and he also looks kind of like he’s about to cry, which makes Adora’s eyes start to burn a little too. “Virtual hug,” he says, and then his webcam goes dark as he presumably hugs his computer. Adora reaches forward to pat the back of her laptop in return, which just makes Adora and Catra’s image go fuzzy for a few seconds. 

Bow ignores the awkwardness. “Adora, it’s an honor.” 

“Thanks to you back,” Glimmer says, quieter than she usually says things, which brings everyone’s attention to her. “I love my mom, but it’s not easy when it’s just me and her. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys.”

“More virtual hugs,” Bow declares. It goes a little better this time, and they’re all laughing as they settle back down. Adora slips her hand into Catra’s. 

“I’m sorry, but I’m still stuck on how this is the best birthday ever. We are in the middle of a global pandemic. We _have_ to top this next year,” Glimmer says, looking at the part of her screen that Adora can only guess is Bow.

“If we start planning now, I bet we can pull it off,” Bow says. He types something into his phone, and a moment later, Catra’s phone vibrates. She tucks it away with a grin. 

Adora believes that they can do it. It’s easy to believe in them. 

But after everything they've done for her, and knowing everything she's learned, she doesn’t just believe that they can. She believes that they will.


End file.
